


Bill of Sale

by softly_speaking_valkyrie



Series: Love Across the Stars [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Age Difference, Awkward Romance, Bad Flirting, Canon Compliant, Cunnilingus, Dom/sub, Drunk Sex, Drunken Flirting, Eventual Smut, Eye Sex, F/F, Fingering, Flashbacks, Flirting, Forced Orgasm, Kissing, Mild Plot, Multiple Orgasms, Mutual Masturbation, Mutual Pining, One Night Stands, Orgasm, Orgasm Control, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Outdoor Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Romance, Rough Sex, Scissoring, Semi-Public Sex, Slow Build, Slow Romance, Wall Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:22:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26011834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softly_speaking_valkyrie/pseuds/softly_speaking_valkyrie
Summary: While on an escort mission of the Luminous, Shara Bey falls asleep in Hyperspace, letting her auto-pilot do all the work - when she wakes her course is off, her squadron is silent and a large gravitational force masquerading as a planetary body is in her path. Pulled out of lightspeed and helpless against an unknown force using bastardised Imperial craft, Shara finds herself crash landing on the planet Jakku, praying that the New Republic will receive her beamed distress call. Meanwhile, as Rey eats her portioned meal stretching into the four thousandth time, she hears the rumbling of a sandstorm approaching, and sees the crashing of an A-Wing piercing through the clouds. Why does everyone end up back at Jakku?
Relationships: Rey/Shara Bey, Shara Bey/Kes Dameron
Series: Love Across the Stars [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1756282
Comments: 16
Kudos: 12





	1. Crash

**Author's Note:**

> On the back of my Enfys x Ahsoka fic 'Of Jedi and Cloud Riders', I had the idea to put one of the most attractive women in the canon timeline with our beautiful Rey. For those unaware, Shara Bey is Poe's mother, so this will end up causing all the funny tension later on. 
> 
> A couple of details are altered from canon for this fic - Shara was only 18 during the Battle of Endor in this AU, and didn't die at all, making her about 44 when this fic takes place. Also I have changed Rey's birth date, now she was born in 10ABY along with both Finn and Poe, making her and them all 24 as of this fic. The age gap between Rey and Shara is just twenty years. 
> 
> This story takes place a few months before the events of The Force Awakens. For simplicity's sake I will involve the start of Poe's search for Luke in that envelope. And this work should feature somewhere between 3 and 5 chapters just to make it a nice read. 
> 
> Enjoy!

The navicomputer on the dashboard of Shara’s A-Wing began to alert her, waking her from the small amount of sleep she’d get on this trip.

It was not an alert of her destination, which was another fair few parsecs away by now, but it was the alert of a planetary body or otherwise gravitational force that was enough to register as a planetary body. Shara shook herself awake, pulling out the small headset and switching on the radio communicator. Looking around at all the blue, she couldn’t see the rest of her escort flying shotgun, nor the transport, but Shara knew they’d be stuck close by. Green Squadron was a tightly knit group, high strung interceptor pilots. In fact Shara knew she would have been the only one of her wing to have managed to doze off, even it had been for just a few minutes.

“Green Leader to squad, all wings report in.”

Over the comm, there was nothing but garbled static. She tried again, yielding the exact same results and could already feel herself start to panic. Before anything else Shara checked the autopilot function, seeing it remain unchanged to before she had closed her eyes. The navicomputer’s warnings began to become a little louder, registering her proximity to the planetary body within Hyperspace decreasing. She couldn’t panic, not like this – over a hundred missions for Mon Mothma and Ackbar and she had never panicked. She’d flown must bulkier craft than an A-Wing. Not even in her ARC-170 had she let her emotions get the better of her. It just didn’t happen in the pilot’s chair.

“I say again; Green Leader to all fighters, all wings report in...”

More static, this time somehow more interfered with than before. Just after her vacant reply came the navicomputer from the small dashboard. She was getting closer.

_Don’t lose yourself, Bey. If Poe knows you’d panicked behind the stick of an A-Wing he’d never let you live it down._

“Green Leader reporting – Transport _Luminous_ , do you copy? Please respond,” she switched frequency and tried the envoy, but again came the same garbled static as the squad comms. She’d lost all of Green Squadron as well as the transport. The beeping on the navicomputer began to grow more rapid, letting her know she was vastly approaching the red line.

If she did not alter her course in Hyperspace or power down from lightspeed within the next few moments she would either be pulled out of it forcefully by the ship’s own failsafe, or crash directly into whatever gravitational force her sensors had detected. And that was a hole other problem Shara hadn’t begun to think about. There were no planetary bodies on the course she and all of her squadron had set before they had left Chandrila. Their destination was Nordis Prime in the Tashtor Sector, and their navicomputers were fully updated to account for solar degradation, rogue and massive asteroids, black holes and other galactic anomalies that could interfere with their charted directory. The New Republic didn’t scrimp when it came to envoys or their escorts and despite the instability, nothing of the prep before the trip instilled Shara with the feeling that this was sabotage.

Something had planted itself directly in her path of its own accord, and it could not be a planet.

“Transport _Luminous_ , I repeat, do you copy? This is Green Leader; I’ve been seemingly placed on trajectory with something registering as a planetary body. If you are receiving this I recommend you pull out Hyperspace and return to Chandrila,” she called into the nothing of the static on the other end of her headset.

Reaching under her dashboard, Shara gripped and pulled her pilot’s helmet over her disobedient and ravishing locks. She caught a glimpse of a red warning from the navicomputer and flipped the screens to manual – she’d have to at this distance. Whatever was in her path was looming closer to her. Shara changed the frequency again to the standard New Republic Hyperspace Emergency channel and took the A-Wing into her hands, ready to release the control rods and pull the craft out of Hyperspace.

“Mayday, mayday; this is Lieutenant Commander Shara Bey of Green Squadron. Is anyone receiving me?” She asked, hoping someone was out there to hear her. All she got back again was the garbled static of interference. She couldn’t help but wonder if she had an Astromech would she be able to quickly tell if she was being actively jammed at this point.

“Mayday...”

There was a sharp jolt in her back before she could repeat herself. The engines shuddered behind her and the controls in her hand began to totally shake. She heaved forward, almost completely out of the chair and into the reinforced glass fibre of the cockpit casing. Whatever happened to her felt her craft being completely torn apart around her. “What the..?” She cried, the blue and luminous effervescence of Hyperspace turning a deathly red-orange all around her. It was as if Hyperspace was burning, her ship catching fire at lightspeed. Discharge took the controls from her; Shara’s dashboard almost caught fire and the beautiful deep ice blue faded in a hurry, almost quaking all around her. In another huge and sharp jolt to the cockpit, her A-Wing fell out of Hyperspace, tumbling into an uncontrollable unilateral spin as she tumbled out of her flight tunnel at the speed of light, slowing down in a much sharper hurry than her RZ-2 A-Wing was no doubt designed for. The controls locked all around her and smoke filled her vision, forcing her cough. Her veteran instincts took over in a manifest and violent flash. She was used to this – had been used to this.

Endor. Naboo. Countless other battles and theatres before them flashed in and out of her aged memory in the span of a heartbeat until she opened her eyes again. She found her mask under the dashboard again as it settled down from the overload. It was still inoperable but Shara could break again in no time, just in time to look out of the cockpit screen.

“That’s... impossible...”

It should have been, but as Shara looked into the vastness of empty space she saw a sight she never thought she would have to see again in her middle years – the familiar and imposing triangle-shape of the underbelly of an Imperial Star Destroyer. Only it wasn’t an ‘Imperial’ destroyer, she could tell that much from the darker durasteel, the bastardised critical systems hanging off of it. The life support dome on the under the side of the hull was wider, yet she could tell immediately that it was much more heavily protected. Dorsal and ventral cannons began to come online around the aft and the stern sections of the capital cruiser. They were slowly moving, but Shara was completely lifeless in her A-Wing. The dashboard was black and empty of impulse, if she couldn’t get it online now she was dead.

“Come on... I’m not dying here. I’m not going out like this...” She cursed to herself as she reached under the dashboard again.

With the mask on her breath became much more profound in her ears as she huffed and panted. Quickly, she darted a stray lock of her radiant hair from her face and behind her ear and tried to fumble her way to a bypass. Wired spewed from the underside of her instruments until she could figure out which was which – the ventral cannons were gleaming a blue she could spot but they were so slow in reacting she had time. Precious seconds were all she needed to get the power going to the motivator. As soon as that was powered, the A-Wing would sing again.

“Would be a lot easier,” she grunted, pulling out wires almost by the handful. “If I had Poe’s BB Unit!” She cursed again, fraying two wires specifically. The Star Destroyer was growing larger, small shapes glimmering into focus from the underbelly of the new and improved beast as she touched the tips of the wires together again and again. The sound of sparks came from under hear dashboard but no life breathed into her interceptor yet.

“Come on you... Ugh!”

The sparks took, and her dashboard lit up as it if was fresh off of the Kuat Systems Engineering belt; the motivator took the power and brought the whole interceptor to life again. Shara looked up to see the glimmering shapes as they suddenly swarmed with white.

“Oh you have _got_ to be kidding me...”

Coming toward her faster than she could remember the older models were a swarm of what looked like incredibly advanced and white-winged TIE/ln Fighters, coloured the same dark black as the destroyer and with red-tinted cockpit panes. In Shara’s memory she could hear the old and menacing howl of the original TIEs in atmosphere. Their incessant and disturbing herald as a result of the twin ion engine technology of their namesake could instil the deepest fear and disturb any organic into submission. Shara knew she could go toe to toe with a whole fighter wing of them. She gripped the control sticks of the A-Wing and turned as best she could with the engines spooling up. Hyperspace was out of the question – even if she could program the navicomputer faster than she ever had while still flying evasive manoeuvres, she knew that the destroyer had Interdictor technology and she’d be going nowhere with it near her.

She checked the scopes, kicking in the afterburners and preying the TIE fighter pilots were as bad as the old Imperial jockeys. Checking the comms at the same time her fears became reality – she was being jammed for sure by the destroyer. In the back of her mind as the thrusters gave her more kick she could hear the howling screech of the TIEs on her tail zooming through the silent vacuum. She just needed to get far enough away; out of their jamming range and she’d at least be able to beam a message to Chandrila. The gravity well projectors were far more powerful than the jamming device on at least an Imperial Interdictor, yet Shara felt the same would be mostly true for whoever had mimicked their devilish design.

Green bolts of laser shot past her cockpit view screen, each razor-sharp bolt missing her craft’s small profile and soaring into open space ahead of her. They couldn’t hit her, not if she kept focused and relied on all of her old Alliance training to keep herself alive. She would never live it down if Poe found out she had died out here, not even knowing where she was. She’d only been twenty years old during her stunts over Endor, but they were deeply ingrained in her middling mind now, the TIEs couldn’t hot even the trails of her of afterburner smoke.

_Just a few metres more... Come on, Shara... You’re not old yet. Just enough to get out of their jamming range and then get the radio beam ready... Come on, Shara._

The console beeped in approval, the comm springing alive again as she ripped off her safety mask and pulled back the headset mic.

“Mayday, mayday; this is Lieutenant Commander Shara Bey of Green Squadron. I’ve been separated from my mission and my squadron. I am currently under attack from unknown forces using old Imperial military equipment and starships. My position is...” She quickly checked the navicomputer and external sensors (of which were still totally shot), finding the reading of a planetary body still present. It took a mere second but the planet was already loaded in the ship’s chart – Jakku.

“My position is the Jakku system in the Western Reaches. Will attempt to land on the planet and launch distress beacon and wait...”

Shara heaved as another contact rattled the A-Wing. The emergency system came online quickly before another heavy heave blasted the back of the fighter. She lurched, her whole stomach wrecked in her body as she slammed into the flight controls – they’d hit her, and not once but twice now and she knew it was lucky the motivator was still operable. Another blast rocked the ship and she could hear the engine unit wheezing afterwards; she had thought too soon. It was the motivator. There was one thing left she could do. Shara knew she was about to be shot down, not the first time in life but one of the most violent. With the last of the power draining from the console again she quickly activated the tight beam array and shot the hologram message as far out as she could in the direction of Chandrila. All she’d have to do now is stay alive. One more bolt hit the aft of her interceptor, completely clipping one the rudder wings – before she could settle back into the chair, Shara could see the destroyer spinning as she no doubt began to spiral out of control.

_Motivator’s gonna give. Gotta activate the re-entry shielding before it does. Creates a fixed layer around the ship. Then point in the direction of Jakku. What else is left?_

Prayer. Luck. She couldn’t remember what else. Her body worked on its own doing as she had thought; she half-expected another bolt to collide with the craft and finish her off. But the TIEs were waving off. In the last glimpse she got of the short range sensors she could see the torrent of dots retreating and forming up en route back to the destroyer. She hoped it would bug out before her rescue arrived, if she was to survive the landing now.

Her suspicions were confirmed – Shara strapped herself into the chair and held her breath as she much as she could get away with. Looking up at the destroyer spiralling away in the distance, she noticed its stern turning, the aft meeting her glance with three bright and powerful thrusters before the whole shape disappeared into Hyperspace. It was gone. All she had to do was survive. Suddenly the thought of the crash didn’t scare her, she’d handled one already – below her was a desert dust ball of a planet just like Tatooine or worse. Shara had seen Jakku once before and therefore knew its climate, it’s terrain, it’s topography. The crash was not what alarmed her. What alarmed her was the planet.

“Why does everyone end up back at Jakku?”

* * *

Shara’s helmet landed in her lap with a forceful thud. She’d been dozing again, set up leaning against one of the rudder rings of her RZ-1 while the rest of the hangar prepped as many fighters as they could.

“Better wake up, Bey,” a voice roused her from her dozing. “Mission clock’s about to start, and I doubt you want to catch the deployment from in here.”

It was Susser, everyone else called her Wexley, but her name was Norra. Shara smiled as she held her flight helmet in both gloved hands and looked up at Norra, her already slightly greying hair catching the lower light of the hangar bay just in the right way to make it glow. The older woman was Y-Wing pilot, not the most glamorous fighter jock in the Alliance, but her skill and prowess in her canopy with stick in hand made Shara respect her in her youth. The typical A-Wing racers didn’t pay the workhorse flyers much mind, and that was to be expected – the BTL had been the staple craft of the Alliance since its inception, even with the Incomm T-65s and the new additions of the Mon Cala B-Wings flooding the fighter ranks to add much needed firepower. But the boys and girls behind the pedals of the RZ-1 A-Wings were of a completely different class. The interceptors were seen as the unsung heroes of the fighter wings; Green Squadron, of which Shara was new blood, was to be the ones protecting the rest of Red, Gold and Blue squadron. Norra gave Shara a warm smile, mutual matriarchal appreciation passing from the older vet to the fresh meat.

“Ackbar’s calling it?” Shara asked, scrambling to her feet and propping her helmet over her ears. Norra had her bulkier helm under her arm.

“Not yet, but it can’t be much longer. Mon Mothma’s on a shuttle out right now and General Calrissian’s going over the last few details with Commander Antilles,” Norra informed her. It didn’t make a difference to Shara, her orders and flight detail came from Arvel Crynyd; Green Leader.

To an eighteen-year-old fresh into the Alliance for what they hoped to be the start of the end, Shara knew things couldn’t be simpler. She’d take Crynyd’s orders, fly protection detail for Red and Gold Squadrons. Blue would take the brunt of the heavy work and deal with any heavy resistance protecting the Death Star; all she would have to worry about most of the battle would be killing more than she got killed and try to keep Antilles’ pilots alive with her.

But hearing Norra tell the plan to her again made her feel more than she was, greater than the sum of her parts and the part she played in Green Squadron. Despite the age gap she did find Susser extremely attractive too – the older woman inspired both loyalty and an appreciation from Shara of a deeply sapphic variety. They mirrored each other’s smiles and walked around the side of the A-Wing, out into the full menagerie of the busy hangar bay.

“How many are already deployed?” Shara asked inquisitively, suddenly wanting to fully engross herself into the operation. She didn’t have the tired zeal that many of the Rebel diehards had at this point, but she was as excited as they were nervous at a shot at this Second Death Star.

“Most of Red Squadron is already in the air, Antilles wants them alert ready for our jump; by the way everyone’s acting, tensions are more than a little high.”

“Are you nervous?”

Norra stopped, close to her Y-Wing halfway down the hangar; several technicians and engineers were still welding components and adding more armour plating to the thrusters units. More and more pilots were flooding into the hangar unit to take their seats in their fighters. The incredibly large and stolen _Lambda_ -class Imperial Shuttle was gone now, Shara must have missed General Solo taking it out on his own mission clock. Looking around the hangar, however, she could still see the iconic YT-1300, the _Millennium Falcon_ still sitting patiently and waiting for Calrissian to take her reigns with Nein Numb. Several B-Wings were beginning to take flight, Shara seeing the colours both Blue and Blade Squadron, commanded by (as she had memorised) Ten Numb and Adon Fox respectively. She was doing her best to make sure she knew all of the wing commanders of each squadron; as a cadet still their pageantry enthralled her just as Norra did. And Norra was not even close to becoming a commander.

“I’m always nervous before a mission,” she told Shara, her olden lips curling into a fair smile. She brushed back the flakes of greying hair and Shara watched them flick and bounce back. If she could become half of the Rebel pilot Norra had become in her twilight years, Shara would have done alright for herself.

“What about this one?”

She blushed when Norra took a step closer between them, resting her free hand on the younger jockey’s shoulder. “How many ships does it take to destroy a Death Star?” Norra asked her in all serious.

“Two, ma’am. Calrissian in the Falcon, Wedge in his X-Wing. He’ll take the power regulator on the north tower while the Falcon’s heavier lasers can completely destroy the core.” She’d memorised that as well, with a detailed precision that had stirred in her sleeping brain. It was at this moment that both Shara and Norra realised that it was the younger former who was the nervous jock.

“How many fighters are participating in this mission, Bey?”

“Almost two hundred strong, ma’am.”

“And how many capital ships? Can you name them all?”

“Yes,” Shara said confidently as she began to go over the photocopy of the ship order list she’d observed on the shuttle from the Nebulon-B to the MC80A, _Home One_. “Four _Braha’tok_ gunships, eight CR90 corvettes, 6 Nebulon-B escort frigates including the _Redemption_ , four DP20 frigates, at least 16 GR75 troop and weapon transports including the _Luminous_ , no less than 15 MC80 star cruisers including the _Liberty_ , _Defiance_ , _Independence_ , _Nautilian_ and _Home One_ on which we stand right now,

“A host of X4 gunships to aid General Solo on the ground should he require it, and two Corellian modified freighters – the _Millennium Falcon_ and the _Ghost_ to be flown by General Calrissian and General Syndulla. That’s not to mention the full complement of Gold, Red, Green, Blue, Grey, Blade, Riot, Corona and Yellow Squadrons. And even an YT-2400 freighter, the _Mighty Oak Apocalypse_. I memorised every single component of the fleet before I came down here to make sure I knew who I was covering for...”

Shara could feel the squeeze of affection pressing into her shoulder as Norra beamed at her, a maternal smile that reminded Shara of an older sister, not entirely a mother, yet Susser did radiate a host of matriarchal energy that Bey wanted to curl up beside and rest within. She felt soft suddenly, like a little girl having her first time around a swoop bike, or a renegade teenager stealing her father’s flight helmet and ending up sleeping the night in the cockpit of his old Z-95 Headhunter. Norra smiled at her with that kind of aura, a proud confidante.

“There’s a reason we’re going to win today, Shara,” Norra told her still beaming and still warm with a hand on her shoulder. “We’ve got stuff that they don’t. _You’ve_ got that stuff too...”

A shooting and violent thought knocked its way through Shara’s rational pilot’s mind and crept into the forefront of her young mind. They had almost two-hundred fighters, yes, but what would happen when the Imperials launched their own complement from the Death Star’s fighter bays. Shara had memorised that beast’s numbers too, as well as just how many TIE fighters of all varieties she could berth.

“What if I get shot down?” Shara had to ask, knowing it had happened to Norra in plenty of occasions in her clunky bucket of bolts called a Y-Wing.

“You won’t,” Norra countered, however both knew the chances of getting shot down like Hobbie over Bakura was extremely rare in a dogfight hellscape like what was to come. If Shara got shot at all, in an RZ-1, it was highly likely that she would be destroyed entirely rather than being disabled enough to crash on Endor.

“But if I do,” she tried to hope.

Norra breathed, searching for the answers from her own experience. She cupped Shara’s cheek for a split second and then tidied her ragged and incredibly beautiful hair. “You activate the re-entry shielding and strap yourself in. The motivator will lose power so you have to point yourself at the planetary body and pray for a while. As soon as you’re through re-entry and your ship’s fried at the front end you’ll have to level her out so you don’t splat like a proton bomb. With some luck you’ll make it out, and then make sure you’re not captured.”

“What happens if I lose consciousness and can’t level her out?”

“Hope that the Force wants you alive...”

* * *

The taste of a half-portion, while used to, never approached Rey as something delicious or even tasty as she sat against the foot of the destroyed AT-AT walker than made her home. The polystarch had expanded into a small lump of what could be described as bread, sour to the taste with an after effect of bitterness that had made her stick out her tongue every day for almost twelve years. The veg-meat was almost even worse always – small and deep green bars that hardly complemented the polystarch tweaking her tongue. Like all the other days she had this much, Rey just tried to stomach it with the desert view as her true meal. Even through the dusty visor of the old Rebel pilot’s helmet over her eyes she saw another ship breaking from Niima Outpost to orbit and then the stars.

A wider galaxy, next stop; anywhere.

Rey had dreamed of it during every evening and every night, every morning even since she has found herself left on the dust ball of a planet she called home for the meantime. That meantime had lasted almost a dozen years now, but she looked up to the darkening sky knowing that her family would return. They would be back for her.

Looking back at her feeble attempt of a hearty meal, that hope sustained her as she made her way through the last bar of the terrible veg-meat and smothered it in a roll make up of the final bites of inflated polystarch. The taste and aftershocks made her throat tingle, her lips want to vomit and her tongue flail but she was done, dumping out the excess fluid onto the sand. She pulled off the pilot’s helm and reached for her makeshift Rebel doll, clutching him closely.

“At least you’ll never leave me,” she told the doll again (for what must have been the thousandth regular and disheartening time). It was a show of faith that she still wasn’t really alone.

She ruminated a while, looking at the distant horizon and the bones of _Imperial II_ -class Star Destroyers, Rebel cruisers and fighters of all shapes and sizes. Rey had picked through so many of their remains, a lot more scavengers picking through more, even living among the graveyard and sleeping in the burst open domes of shield batteries and TIE Fighters. She felt lucky for her makeshift, toppled over home and original speeder. Rey had made her transport swoop entirely herself, from the picked parts from the boneyard and it was almost perfect enough for her. Inside, on one of the walls were four thousand, two hundred and sixty one regular lines etched into the durasteel with a host of tools and sharp appliances. That was how many days she had taken her evening nutrition out on the sand, propped against the same walker foot, watching Niima Outpost’s traffic and gazing at the starship graveyard she’d pick at for a living. Rey sighed again, wondering how many more lines she’d have to etch.

Tiredness grew within her, and then exhaustion. She picked up her bowl and tossed her soft toy into the helmet to take inside. A small wind had picked up; Rey smelled an irritation in the air. A sandstorm was brewing close, it’d be upon her in the night so she would have to close the hatchway she’d made for the entrance into the AT interior. She’d suffered through her fair share of sandstorms every year on Jakku; Rey was a veteran of withering them even outside and caught in their buffet. In her survival pack the scavenger carried a large and thick blanket, heavier than most to shroud her when caught in the desert with no time to return home. It always took hours after the fact in the baking sun to clear her speeder of sand but she was untouched through the blanket.

Just as stood up, another sound hit her ears – the sound of engine failure, motivator breakdown and the force of re-entry on a rogue object.

Rey dropped her things, running around her house and scrambling up the legs of it to the main hull. Over the horizon a flaming piece of what looked to be debris coming in through the last of the cloud layer. Whatever it was, a pluming smoke trail and brilliant flames radiated from the front and back, but Rey could make out the discharge of thrusters pyre failing into dust out of the rear. She had to squint to make out the shape but soon saw it was a giant and falling ‘A’. A fighter? A random fighter falling through the stratosphere and coming in hot. Had her pilot already bailed? As the A-Wing drew closer to the ground, Rey could see it trying to move, trying to level out harshly – she stared in wonder, watching it slowly but definitely bailing from its death dive. It was deadly close to the sand by the time it did level but that confirmed to the young scavenger that there was definitely a pilot in it canopy. Rey froze, wondering what to do – the ship was definitely going to crash, but did she have time to get to it?

The A-Wing came in lower than low, soaring over Rey’s head before she’d moved again, flames spurting all over the craft as it hurdling almost at mach speed past the AT-AT and over several dunes. Rey stood motionless when she heard the colossal thud ringing out over the desert like the sound of a proton bomb detonating.

And then there was silence again.

There had to have been a pilot in the chair; there was no way the ship could have levelled out like that if there hadn’t been. And if there was, that pilot was either in terrible shape, or would be once the sandstorm hit their crash site. Rey knew they were could be no way of them getting to Niima or anywhere before night fully rolled in.

They would be dead by dawn.

She had no choice; her morals wouldn’t let her rest after seeing the thing crash, not really. She would ride out, inspect the crash, check for a pulse and if the pilot was alive she’d get them to Niima before the sandstorm hit, providing she had enough time. Thinking more, Rey realised she could blanket the small interceptor and let it be hidden by the sand until morning. She would know where it was – Rey knew the topography of the desert like she knew her own mind, and there was no other scavenger, not even Teedo, which knew where things were in the maze of the sand.

Rey gathered her pack and her staff, threading it through the netting of her speeder and assembled her cloth wraps to protect her face. Whoever needed her help now would get it. It was just who Rey was.


	2. Salvage

“...Alright Greens, dial it back and check your servos, that _Executor_ ’s coming about and bearing on _Home One_. Green Two, Green Three, on me; we’re going in fast and low through the superstructure,” Shara heard Arvel ordering through her comm.

He was right – the Super Star Destroyer Executor was accelerating to sublight speed as more and more of the triangle-shaped destroyers flooded the spacescape of the Endor orbit. It was moving around to meet Ackbar’s heavy cruiser in a head-to-head onslaught; out of the corner of her vision she saw three A-Wings breaking hard right and forming up with an entourage of X-Wings. They were heading right up the gut, through the maze of the body of the _Executor_ and along to the small primary bridge. Arvel’s plan was foolhardy and fast, but even Shara could see that they had a shot. Jake Farrell was flying fighter cover with another group of BTLs and B-Wings, doing his best, but Crynyd had split Green Squadron in two in order to attack the Super Star Destroyer. Gripping the stick of her RZ-1, Shara swerved to a hard left, forming up with Lieutenant L’ampar, the Duros XO of the whole squadron. Her targeting computer began to flare in alarm, alerting her in sequence with the sensor cluster. Three fighters on the lieutenant’s tail coming in at attack speed. Shara reached for her helmet comm and tried to hail her lieutenant.

“L’ampar you’ve gone some on your tail!” She called, pushing on the throttle and accelerating to attack speed herself.

The slight adrenaline shocked her system and Shara saw stars as the body of her interceptor pinned her back into her chair. On L’ampar’s tail were two TIE/in Interceptors and one TIE/ln Fighter with red markings around the wing and light grey body.

Shara knew that sigil – a crescent circle with three rank lines filing out from its circumference. _Inferno Squadron_. Shara’s grip on her flight stick tensed. They were the intruder’s who had freed Iden Versio from the _Invincible Faith_ only days ago as the fleet amassed at Sullust. That story hadn’t done wonders for morale as it ran its course through the plentiful pilot ready rooms in the days leading up to this assault. Seeing the modified TIE/ln made Shara’s heart pound in her chest. She fired the afterburners, calling her targeting computer again to her right eye as she lay back in her pilot’s chair – in the luminous orange of her targeting scope she saw all three fighters laser in on L’ampar’s position and almost sloppy flight reprieve. They were going to try and push him quicker than he could fire up his afterburners into overdrive. But Shara knew she was faster.

“This is Green Nine, I’m going in. I’ve got you covered Green Five,” she relayed to L’ampar, making sure he knew wasn’t alone and he wasn’t dead.

He was flying faster as she caught up with the vultures on his tail, readying her concussion missiles. “Green Four, I’m bringing them to you,” L’ampar radioed to Jake, changing his flight pattern and tilting swift and hard to the left. He was dragging his quarry to the firing solution from the _Executor_. The kickback from her ship was hard in Shara’s side but she kept the three craft in her sights, trying to get a missile lock. She still had enough munitions left, and when they were spent she’d switch to laser cannons; it was exactly how Norra had reminded her. The other A-Wing jocks used their ordnance so sparingly against fighters closing in. Norra had told Shara to be confident in her ability, and that Imperial pilots were caught off guard with an interceptor stick hurling explosives at them.

Weaving between turbolaser fire from both the _Executor_ and from _Home One_ made Shara’s chest convulse; she almost wanted to throw up being this close to death on all sides but she would not leave her lieutenant to bite the dust. She edged the throttle a little more, closing the gap and biting her lip.

_Move to the right. Move to the right. Move to the right._

The left most interceptor moved slightly to the right, exactly where she wanted it to and directly into her scopes. Her target lock was secured and Shara squeezed the rear trigger for her concussion missile. Four large and incredibly quick missiles flew off of the rack out of her nose and clipped the interceptor before he had a chance to even think. The superiority fighter jerked and veered off, pushing the second interceptor into her scopes. Instead of watching more of her missiles she pressed hard into the trigger of her laser cannons. Rapid red shot from either side of her cockpit, blasting his wings off before the Imperial could veer and wave off. Another flurry of pink, red and orange detonated behind L’ampar but Shara couldn’t see the Inferno Squadron pilot again afterward. “Where’s the last one? I’ve lost visual. Repeat; lost visual,” she reported on the channel.

“Watch it Green Nine, you’ve got one on your tail!” Jake Farrell exclaimed, pushing to reach her on an intercept trajectory.

Her sensors screamed at her as she took her fingers off of the triggers and rested back into the chair again. She tried the afterburners but there was no juice left. They were recharging behind her, slowing her speed and reducing her to a sitting duck beyond the superiority fighter closing in. On the dashboard Shara could see him closing the distance and before she could blink there were tightly packed green laser bolts pulsing around the front of her vision. He wanted her. Her had her. Norra’s advice went through her mind again.

_You’re okay. Breathe it in, reel it deep. Control yourself, Shara. Hold her steady and weave through his shots like you did under the bridges back in Theed._

Suddenly the shots beyond her reach became like the pillars of marble bridges, the formations of the canyon training ground each Bravo pilot flew in to be a part of the parade-like defence fighter force. That was where she had cut her teeth in flying – Naboo. She was a blur; he could not hit her for seconds, and even a minute, until the torrents of green laser fire stopped and her sensor tracker stopped beeping. She checked her instruments but the craft was gone entirely. “Good shooting, Shara,” L’ampar called to her.

“It... It wasn’t me...” She found herself saying in shock as she passed out of the firing solution of the capital ships. Another craft came alongside of her; it was the _Phantom II_ , the shuttle of Hera Syndulla’s VCX-100 with a fair and short-haired warrior woman in the front seat just a little younger-looking than Shara herself. “Commander Wren...”

“Lieutenants, the _Executor_ ’s forward shield’s are still up... but I gotta a huge opening on their deflection tower on the left-hand side of the command deck,” Shara heard Jake radioing in. Quickly she formed up on his wing, L’ampar joining them and turning tail around the aft of the Super Star Destroyer. “Permission to engage, Green Five?”

“Take Shara and give Green Leader a way in, I’ll cover you Green Four.”

At that moment Crynyd’s voice came garbled through the static into their comma channel. “Tycho’s down! Green Two wave off! Wave off!”

“Now, Jake!” L’ampar ordered him. Shara saw her wingman veering off and blasting his afterburners in the direction of the deflection tower; she remembered the schematics after only having seen them once. If this went down, the bridge would be defenceless against any assault Arvel launched on the command tower.

She followed Jake, flipping the retro and bouncing her A-Wing in a hundred and eighty flip and caught up to Jake in a fraction of a second. She was right behind him in moments as he throttled down and dodged the torrent of turbolasers stationed all around the two deflection towers atop the commanding tower complex. The way he weaved and pivoted around them utterly dazzled Shara. Kes Dameron was her sweetheart, a member of the Pathfinders down on the forest moon charging with General Solo still, he was everything to her. But he was no pilot (however neither was Shara herself by the way she often described her flying). The way Jake outflew her was dazzling even as the battle raged all around them; Shara held her sticks tight in her lap and breathed in deep, trying not to lose herself in the imagery of Sabine Wren saving her hide from an Inferno Squadron pilot. 

“Stay with me, Bey... On my mark...” She heard Jake encouraging her in her ear.

She leaned forward, hanging on his every word, even his every breath. TIEs and other craft spiralled in death spins all around her with their tailgates aflame but Jake created a perfect column in which to follow as he assaulted the tower. When he spoke, she was there.

“Fire!”

Shara tensed the triggers and her laser cannons let rip. With Jake’s combined firepower they tore through the slim shielding around the component itself and then pelted the durasteel itself. One short pass and a barrage of laser bolts as she held the sticks tighter than ever. _Home One_ was too close, Ackbar was too close. If they lost him and the MC80A the whole offensive would still fail – Shara held her breath, not even hearing Jake in her ear. “Shara, wave off now! It’s gonna blow!” He bellowed at her. She woke from her slight panic with enough time to veer away from the tower just as she could make out the bulkheads ripping and bucking at the seams. In the sides of her vision through her cockpit visor she could make out the deflection tower bursting open into a plume of flame and smoke. They’d done it, Arvel was clear; Shara continued to follow Jake as he rejoined L’ampar and began to snipe more targets badgering the rest of Blue and Grey Squadron. Looking off once more, Shara could see the whole hull of an _Imperial II_ -class Star Destroyer being torn apart by the _Liberty_ and _Invincible Faith_. The sparks and explosions were bewitching.

“Green Leader wave off!” She suddenly heard L’ampar calling out on the shared channel.

She tilted to the right, looking into the complex maze of the _Executor_ ’s structure. Towers stood everywhere around it’s city-like hull configuration like dull stalagmites while in the middle of them was Arvel and one lone X-Wing sluggishly behind trying to dodge the internal turbolaser fire.

Looking behind the pair of remaining fighters Shara Bey could see they’d done their best to destroyer what batteries they could but now they were too few and she could see smoke coming from Arvel’s A-Wing. “Green Leader you’ve got smoke coming from your starboard engine and it looks like you’re losing motivator kick. I see two on your wingman’s tail!” She screamed, watching TIEs begin to thread the maze of towers like her commander and his defence. “Now four! Get outta there Green Leader!”

“I’m going in to help him out...” L’ampar told her.

“No! Lieutenant you’re in command of Green Squadron now...” Arvel groaned, his tone twisted in pain. Shara almost audibly gasped. “Get clear, Greens!”

“Commander!” L’ampar barked.

Arvel was spiralling out of control. From their position above the capital ship, both Shara and L’ampar could see his A-Wing lose its stabiliser. The X-Wing trailing behind him caught a crossfire glancing shot from a turbolaser, then a direct hit from another and detonated sharpish into a flurry of plate wings and flames. Arvel was still flying but in a lateral spin, losing control of his craft and fast. There was no way for him to pull out it either – Shara could calculate insanely quickly that he had no chances left. The former Bacta cartel pilot from Rishi had used up his nine lives and Shara watched helplessly as the TIEs flew him down, closing the gap in an instant. She could tell what he was going to do before L’ampar protested in the radio channel.

The Green Leader must have gripped the stick and the throttle as hard as he could and pulled up with all his might, because Shara could see his A-Wing careening upward as he came to the end of the maze. His interceptor locked its trajectory with the command deck and flew right through it like a knife with enough force to shake the whole tower. Flames plumed from the bridge but no A-Wing came out the other side. The hulking mass of the Super Star Destroyer _Executor_ went limp, and powered up, hurtling towards the Second Death Star.

“All wings...” L’ampar stuttered, parting from Shara and looking for more of the enemy to engage, or to cover the B-Wings beginning to make their attack runs on more of the Star Destroyers. Without the _Executor_ , now things could really start to unravel for the Empire. “Break speeds and weapons free...”

Shara took that as an excuse. She had fire in her lungs now, remorse for Arvel’s life but a need to engage the enemy all the more now with their second super weapon destroyed. Veering into view of the Second Death Star she could still see the colossal capital ship plummeting headlong into it above the axis and close to the superlaser dish. Looking at the small planetoid behind the vessel, Shara wondered how much longer General Calrissian and Antilles would take to destroy the thing. Already the Alliance ships were breaking formation and parting through the crowds of _Imperial II_ s to create the perimeter Ackbar had planned. Shara spotted a duo of B-Wings attracting attention from a wing and pushed her foot on the throttle. Reaching for the laser cannon triggers, lining up her shot, Shara smiled. She felt the flow of battle penetrate her ship and infect her body, letting her system ride it out as the battle really turned. This was it, they were going to win. They were going to win – this was the start of the end for the Empire.

She went to squeeze the trigger, and unexpectedly a sharp jolt hit her back. The instruments on her console flared into the red and the motivator was fried. Her fears, the conversation with Norra; it all came back to her. She’d been shot. No, she’d been shot _down_. Her A-Wing crested and suddenly Endor came into full view in front of her – she wasn’t flying anymore, she was falling, and Endor was coming up to meet her.

* * *

Rey reached the crash site in good time. It was barely a twenty-minute ride on her speeder to where the A-Wing had sunk into the dune, and as she approached it, the scavenger noticed a severe lack of debris. Whoever was piloting it was god – _very_ good at flying.

They must have managed to regain control of the stabiliser and the motivator just at the right moment to not only level out the craft on their collision course with the ground, but whoever was in the chair had had the instinct to hold her steady as the ground came closer. The resulting crash was less of a collision and more of a skid to a full stop with the dune. The smoke from the overloaded engines, Rey could tell as she stopped her homemade speeder and got off. She lifted her goggles up and took off her mouth guard to look at the A-Wing closer with her naked and unblemished eyes. It was certainly an RZ-2; she’d seen the model advertised and looked at in Niima Outpost a few times, but had never seen one with her own two eyes before. Even in a slumped wreck like it was now, Rey could tell the fighter had a beautiful and sleek shape – her profile was smaller than Rey had imagined, smaller than almost any craft she’d seen or been in.

She was an adept of a pilot, having flown many of both Unkar Plutt’s and Constable Zuvio’s craft out of Niima on some milk runs and other tasks in and around the Jakkuan orbit. The scavenger had taught herself how to fly Zuvio’s Quadjumper, and waited for any chance she had to fly any of Plutt’s multitudes of ships in various working orders – even his stolen YT-1300 freighter, the one he had stolen from the Irving Boys. Still against her objections he’d installed that blasted compressor. Rey always knew it would put too much stress on the Hyperdrive, she felt it every time he took her on a delivery or business deal in the garbage-like ship. One day she knew she could formulate a way to bypass the infernal component and make the old girl sing.

Looking at the crashed A-Wing was like looking at a treasure trove. Walking closer she knew she had hit the mother lode in terms of salvage; she could tell just by looking at the rear thrusters even with the smoke billowing from both of them. That would be an easy fix. Combined as she walked around the side of the craft she could make hundreds of portions from how intact she’d found it. But Rey knew it would mean that Teedo and his traders would want it too, and there was no way she could move it all at once even after the storm. This would be at least two days of stripping it down, and then she would have to hire a space to keep the bigger modules in Niima Outpost. That would take resources she didn’t have yet, maybe even actual money, currency of some kind she hadn’t even handled in her life.

Rey reached the cockpit, seeing the reinforced glass broke in and smashed inside and out. Bigger shards littered the front of the ship buried in the half-dune, while smaller pieces littered the interior.

She found the star pilot.

Although, looking over the body (of which she had no idea if they were alive or not yet) she could only make out a small section of an obscured face, shrouded by a breathing mask. Rey had to look deeper.

She reached into the forcefully burst canopy, pulling at the pilot’s mask to reveal a fair and beautiful face. The darker shade of their skin was pleasant on the eye and even closed their eyes struck Rey and made her chest rise and fall with a little more weight. She reached for the pilot’s helmet, lifting it off to unleash a wavy and curled torrent of the most beautiful hair Rey had seen yet in her twenty years of life. She could see the pilot was a woman, and judging from the way her darkened green flight fit her, a heavy-built and strong woman at best. Combining face with hair, Rey stumbled back a bit, kneeling on the body of the A-Wing like a stunted teenager, enthralled by this gorgeous woman that had crashed essentially on her front yard.

Rey held her breath, reaching for the woman’s neck to check for a pulse. Much to her relief, the pilot was indeed alive, and Rey could spot no piercing shards of glass poking into her flight suit that might give away sign of injury. The console looked perfectly intact too, meaning her legs were safe.

The scavenger reached for the belts, trying to untangle the pilot from her chair to pull her safe from the wreckage. Rey knew the craft wasn’t about to explode, but she didn’t want to leave the woman inside either. Just as the clasp of the safety belts sprang free from around the pilot, and as Rey reached in to haul her from the chair, the woman began to stir. Her eyes flitted opened as Rey reached within, and the pilot abruptly awoke in frenzy.

She was yelling next, reaching for her blaster pistol at her him in a flash and aiming it directly at Rey – in turn she kicked up her staff into her hands with acrobatic precision and pointed it at the frenzied pilot.

“Calm down! You’re alright!” Rey barked at her.

“Where the hell am I? What happened? Who are you?” The middle-aged pilot was crying out, her hand trembling around the blaster pistol. It was shock, possibly along with a concussion; the red pulsing into her mellow and dark eyes struck Rey deeply but she was standing her ground on the flattop of the downed A-Wing.

“You’re on Jakku, you crashed from orbit but you pulled yourself out of a dive at the last minute, I saw you crash and I came to find you...” Rey explained, her voice cool and collected and slow to make sure all of the information hit home. Possibly against her better judgement, Rey stood down, hoisting her staff over her shoulder and breathing, lowering herself to her knees. “You were... quite remarkable actually – I never thought a pilot could come back from a dive like that.”

“Where... Where’s my ship..?” The pilot spluttered.

Rey almost chuckled, looking around her feet. “You’re still in your ship; like I said you pulled off something incredible and you were able to make out mostly untouched...”

The pilot heaved, releasing her breath and dropping her pistol to the floor of the cockpit. It fell amongst the throttle and retro pedal and finally she could breathe. “You’re a scavenger, aren’t you?” The pilot asked. Rey nodded a little proudly, her hand almost extending. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Rey... I’m Rey. What about you?”

“Shara Bey,” she responded, her half-busted lip twitching into a smile as she rested into her chair again. “I suppose that rhymes pretty well, huh?” She asked, almost laughing. Rey’s responsive smile was infectious, as well as extremely adorable. Her youthful face wormed its way into Shara’s mind and turned it upside down. The divorcee looked at the evidently younger woman and found her attractions wanting to fly as indulgent and almost trashy as it felt to realise it. In her middling years Shara hadn’t realised she had developed a liking for younger women, in the wake of becoming separated from Kes. Her son’s confidante, Zorii Bliss had always enticed Shara under her Spice Runner’s helmet.

Something more of her rescuer, Rey, struck Shara more deeply. As the youthful scavenger extended her hand to pull the aging pilot out of her seat, Shara felt herself blushing for the first time in a long while. Her feminine wilds felt personal, deep, even renewed as Rey pulled her from the wreckage. Shara fully expected her body to collapse in pain, broken bones and possibly internal complications, but she was totally fine.

She dusted herself off. “Completely untouched? Wow...” Rey remarked.

“Yeah... I mean, _yeah_ ,” Shara slightly boasted, pulling down the zipper on her flight suit some. “Can’t say it’s my best landing, but certainly better than my crash on Endor.”

“Endor?” Rey repeated, the name for sure ringing a bell with her, Shara could tell standing before her and letting the top half of her jumpsuit fall over her hips. Jakku was of a colder climate than most desert worlds, but still warm enough to warrant her walking around in a tank top.

“Of course. Now _that_ wasn’t my best landing, nor my best kill count. But then again, I did help take down the Empire’s nastiest Star Destroyer.”

“You mean... You’re a Rebellion pilot?” Rey practically swooned, the tone of her voice covered in wonder and sprinkled with splendour.

“No Rebellion anymore, Rey, but yes. I was a part of Green Squadron during the Battle of Endor.”

“I’ve never met a Rebellion veteran before,” she almost giggled again, her smile beaming.

“Who’s saying I’m a Vet?” Shara teased. “Still a serving member of the New Republic Security Force... of what little it’s allowed,” she whined. A beleaguered wheeze pressed from her crashed A-Wing, mirroring her sentiments of the state of the centralised navy. Yet she could never bring herself to disagree with Mon Mothma’s reasoning for almost totally diminishing it when she assumed the role of Chancellor.

There was a small space of silence between the women, one in her middle age and the other almost half that. Shara wondered if Rey was thinking the same as her as she considered the athletic and fair-looking scavenger. The way the wind was blowing forced curly strands of glistening raven hair into both of their faces – from the size of Rey’s smile, Shara knew she had instantly struck a chord with the plucky rogue. Their eyes met, both beautiful shades of brown connecting as the gentle breeze began to pick up. As Rey glanced into the pilot’s eyes, observing the way her simply gorgeous hair moved in the breeze, daring not to admire the muscular yet not chiselled frame of her older body (which certainly showed signs of an earlier childbirth from Rey’s best guess compared to other mothers at Niima Outpost). Rey instinctively bit her lip, her eyes darting back up to see the interior hues of Shara’s.

_By the stars, she’s simply gorgeous._

Rey wondered if Shara had thought the same thing, judging by the way she was looking back. Shara’s thoughts mirrored Rey’s note for note; they were both moonstruck as the sound of growling distracted Rey soon thereafter. “Get down!” She screamed.

She put herself in Shara’s place, knocking the older pilot to the sand as the source of the growling pounced over the dune and tackled at Rey just as she pulled out her staff again. The scavenger caught the beast’s jaws with her weapon, holding it back and trying to get her feet underneath it to kick it off. She had to think fast, the beast was a Vworkka, a vicious raptor-like predator and by the snarling of its juicy jaws it was hungry for flesh. Rey panted heavily, holding her staff with all her might to catch the Vworkka’s claws and sharp teeth snarling and snapping at her. The sand slipped away under her feet, but Rey kicked as hard as she could and fumbled, getting them under the predator. With a tremendous effort she kicked it off and scrambled to her feet.

The Vworkka pounced back, circling her and within a second was charging.

Digging her heels in, Rey prepared herself, her instincts flaring and her forearms ready to whack the beast across the neck and scare it off. She couldn’t kill it, no way. She had a knife but it was on the speeder – her staff was all she had. The Vworkka saw the doubt in her eyes, leaping at her; Rey buckled and closed her eyes, sensing her end. It was only the piercing sound of a blaster pistol echoing around the enclosed dune that forced Rey to open her eyes again in time to see her quarry fall limp to the floor with a smoke hole in its hide.

She turned her vision to see Shara, hand on the hull of the A-Wing with her blaster deadeye in front of her squinting eyes, and smoke emanating from its snub-nosed barrel. She’d shot the Vworkka and saved her.

“Thanks...” Rey panted, letting herself breathe again as she threw the staff back over her shoulder.

The sensation to her ear let her know the sandstorm was coming in quicker than before as Shara holstered her pistol. “Which way is the closes settlement?” Bey was asking as Rey continued to calm herself.

“Niima Outpost... You won’t make it there before the sandstorm hits.”

“You can tell?” Shara asked a little incredulously. She cocked an eyebrow, perturbed how the youthful scavenger could tell there was a storm coming so nonchalantly.

“I’ve been here a while...”

Shara dead-stopped, looking Rey over again in her sand-coloured and almost ethereal robes. She looked as if she had been, but Shara could scarcely believe it. The way Rey carried herself, the way she talked, the way she looked at and considered Shara as a woman (and an older woman at that) were all completely counter to the notion that she was a simple desert dweller. Shara didn’t know if it made the other woman more attractive, but it was certainly working to make her like Rey further. The scavenger nodded, dusting the sand out of her baggy pants and off of her rump – the Vworkka had done its job to mess her up and was already sinking into the soft sand.

“I have a shelter a little way away,” Rey broke the silence, pulling the large and expansive thick cover sheet from her speeder. “If we hurry we can make it. This will cover your ship until morning, and then we can get to work dismantling it for parts.”

“We can’t dismantle my ship... I need to get back to the New Republic.”

“You won’t be going anywhere at all if you get caught out in a sandstorm, Shara. Help me cover it at least,” Rey continued, hauling the cover. From behind her, Shara could see her heave, her rear poking out ahead of the rest of her – the elder pilot couldn’t stop herself from looking, she was always one with the eyes for a woman, and a man.

A thought came to the observant stranded. “You’re a scavenger, you must know your way around a ship or two.”

“You seem awfully quick to dismantle my craft – how about you help me haul it out the sand and get it fixed. You said it yourself she’s intact. Help me fix her.”

“And what are you going to pay me with?”

Shara knew she had Rey. As cute as she was, and as attracted as Bey knew she was, she still knew how to twist a younger woman around her finger – perhaps that was why she had a mild thing for them. Already she had floated the motion, all she needed now was payment, of which Shara Bey had absolutely nothing. She’d been to Jakku before, albeit not Niima, but she knew the people, knew scavengers and how they worked. If Rey was akin to the rest Shara had met, there would be no progress made on the promise of New Republic Credits. Rey would need compensation fast, liquid and on the spot. There was nothing Shara could pay her with. Nothing that she had thought of paying with before.

“I’m sure we can come to an arrangement, Rey. It is _my_ ship.”

Rey eyed her as they tossed the cover sheet over the wreck of the A-Wing and she dusted off her hands again. “Unless it’s tangible, I’m not going to be interested I’m sorry.”

That’s what Shara had thought she would say. Rey was plucky, another reason why Shara knew she already liked her, liked her stuff – and in the corner of her eye Shara could tell she was looking again. Letting her get ahead, Shara looked back, admiring the firmness of Rey’s rear enveloped in the fabric of her baggy pants. Fresh of a crash seemed like the best time as any to look; her head began to sting, but Rey was a most welcome sight.

“How long do the storms last around here?” She had to ask, checking her options and forming a plan through the vestiges of her fading concussion.

“Anywhere from eight to twelve hours, it usually depends. Why?”

“Gives us time to talk... Negotiate.”

Rey smiled, hopping onto her homemade speeder and extending her hand again. “I could use the company...”

Shara smiled back, the same amount of coy. “I’m sure you could.”


	3. Taste

The pair managed to make it back to Rey’s dwelling before the sweeping bluster of the sandstorm’s edge hit the metal bunker-like wreck. The scavenger pulled another sheet from under the sand and covered her homemade speeder in it to save from sand clogging up her innards. It would save time in the morning the way Rey figured it.

Some trace amounts of sand billowing through her deep and almost oily hair, Rey quickly guided her new guest into her hut – Shara would be her first real visitor, the only person apart from Rey who would stay at her home.

“Don’t touch anything. I’ve got to make sure the hatch is sealed otherwise we’ll have a draft... of sand...” She still couldn’t really focus around Shara. The older woman had had to wrap her aged yet strong arms around her as they rode back from the crashed A-Wing. Rey heaved to get the hatch closed and had to kick to seal the latch.

As soon as the causeway was sealed and they were warm and protected inside of the AT-AT, the full brunt of the sandstorm hit the already nearly buried walker. Rey returned to her lob-sided living room to see Shara marvelling in what she had done with it all around her. The pilot looked from the small bathroom in the corner Rey had modelled herself from scavenged parts, to the flooding of marked tallies on the longest and clearest bulkheads. Upon them, Shara Bey lingered, seeing the most recent one with some of the metal peeling off where Rey had etched the latest day. They were too innumerable to read all at once, and Shara tried to give the impression that she wasn’t staring at all the numbers, all the days; she turned her head and observed the main living room, even the small workbench and table, and the cot-like bedding in a bar compartment. Rey had even managed to hollow out the whole hull of the walker – although it felt small, it was much larger than Shara had known the interior of an AT-AT walker to be, and she had studied the schematics shortly before the Battle of Hoth.

She had only just joined the Rebel Alliance back then, now it felt like a lifetime ago. Evacuating that icy wasteland had really been the scariest assignment she flew for the Rebels. She didn’t even have an A-Wing for that operation; the only thing she had the stick to fly then was an old and retrofitted ARC-170 starfighter salvaged from a Republic graveyard. 

“I never knew someone could do this to one of these things... Last time I had to take one on properly was in a flying cargo container pretty much. Had my tail gunner and we nearly lost a whole wing as we blasted our way outta Echo Base...” 

“They’re not that tough when they’re on their side already. Although I did have to wrestle this place from an angry Ripper-Raptor. Nearly lost an eye to kick him out of the kitchen, you know...” Rey faux boasted, leaning against one of the rusted bulkhead walls.

There was a moment of silence before both she and Shara ending up bursting out within extensive laughter, progressing into a giggling frenzy. Rey wanted to know more immediately. Already she was enthralled just by the trace amounts of what Shara had let slip as a Rebel pilot and now the history buff and wide-eyed dreamer inside of the twenty-year-old Rey was screaming out within her for more details. She reached for the other end of the room all at once, letting Shara sit in one of the cushions she’d worked a plethora of extra time scavenging as much as she could for actual currency for them off of a trader from Nantoon. While the elder lady sat and inspected the cushion and the wall again, Rey set to getting her some water.

Shara checked the weaving on the pillow; it was Rhodian, withered beyond belief and by the looks of things probably not even natively make on Rhodia. Working with the New Republic Security Forces, Shara had seen even more of the civilised systems that had made up the older Republic than she’d had exposure to as Rebel grunt. Looking back to the wall, Shara quickly did the calculations. Forty rows of one hundred individual tallies stretching across two bulkhead slabs of rusted durasteel. Over four thousand days. Shara almost gaped.

“Been here a long time, huh?”

Rey paused, almost dropping the metal cup repurposed from a broken half of a larger power regulator module from an Imperial shuttle. She just looking at the other wall, trying not to think about it as she rinsed out the cup and filled it with water from the larger stockpile she had. Rain was the scarcest thing on Jakku, even as far as life was concerned, but she almost made sure she bartered for it when the water barons arrived via heavily armoured and guarded transports. They always needed tech and scrap, and Unkar Plutt always seethed at her when she unloaded her most valuable pieces came out of netting for the barons and not him.

She brought the cup to Shara, going without; she was full and would maintain a thimble full next to the cot bedding in the other room while she slept. Not only that but even after her portions, Rey simply wasn’t feeling thirsty, or much of anything as she observed her own wall.

“You have no idea just how long...” Was all she could say on the matter.

“Any family..?”

“I’d actually rather not talk about it with a stranger, sorry,” she almost snapped. “Sorry... Really, it just...”

Shara’s hand came to hers already, her rugged and dray palms still feeling softer than Rey was used to anything feeling on Jakku. Feeling the calluses on Shara’s skin, Rey wondered when the last time it was than someone had actually touched her like that. She could only remember Unkar Plutt holding her arm rather forcefully as she watched her parents disappearing on a transport liner bound for orbit. Shara’s palm on her skin felt like an ocean she’d never seen before, a breath of actual fresh air, not something full of sand.

Before either could dwell on the feeling, one rather large clump of dried air hit the outer hull of the house, rattling the ceiling and making Shara almost scoff. “Jakku was the first desert world I fought on. I’d seen Tatooine before then on several different occasions flying escort and combat detail for Antilles... But this one rattled us all differently,” she explained, casting her mind back a couple of decades to the battle out in the graveyard. Thousands and thousands of ships all colliding and attacking each other in a last effort to decide the fate of the galaxy – and that time the Empire knew it had lost.

There was no Emperor, no Lord Vader, and no _Executor_. Jakku was known to a lot of the Rebel veterans as ‘Empire’s End’ for a good reason. 

“Something about the sand here’s different to how it is on other desert worlds. Even the rocky outcroppings on places like Dathomir or the warmer places on Kashyyyk. Jakku just has something about it that rubbed us all the wrong way.”

“I don’t much like the sand,” Rey piped up, still feeling a little awkward, a little stretched as she looked at the floor between her legs and then back up at the ceiling. It even had some sand clumps working their way through the parted cracks in the bulkheads; but they were holding as well as a decades-old walker could. “Even on Jakku, even with the cold climate I can’t much care for it – it’s still dry, still coarse, still irritating...” she sighed, feeling yet more of it in her baggy pants and in her socks. It wasn’t until Shara had made her aware that Rey had sand almost all over and in her clothing still.

“And it gets everywhere...” Shara finished, smiling at Rey’s melancholic monologue.

Again, Rey felt the urge to laugh, just based on how the older pilot was looking at her, how she’d finished her sentence. The sentiment was raggedy, even silly. Rey convulsed, laughing just a little as she looked between the floor, her covered feet and Shara trying not to burst out.

“You’re a Rebel pilot...” Rey broke the silence moments later.

“New Republic now. But I flew for the Alliance since I was seventeen just before we had to evacuate Echo Base on Hoth...” Shara began, Rey shuffled on her own cushion and shrugged some more of the sand from in the fabrics of her clothes. The younger woman distracted herself with the dust but then settled back to pay attention to her guest. “Have you flown before? You seemed to know more about ship than just what an engineer might have learned.”

Rey blushed, her modest ability and her shyness around women obviously getting the better of her. She looked between her ankles again and looked at the calluses that had formed around them too – inside of her sock-like shoes were naked feet, scuffed from grinding against finer sand and walking on metal day after day four-thousand times. Had she flown, though? Only a handful of times, working out the kinks in some garbage ships lingering around Unkar Plutt’s junkyard-like garage. The highlight of her flight career had been joyriding in Zuvio’s Quadjumper once just to see the stars, but that stint had quickly come down tumbling from orbit on the leash of a tractor beam with auto turrets pointing her way.

“I wish I could fly properly, like a Rebel pilot,” she wistfully sighed, looking in the hatchway at the old and beaten helmet with the insignia of the old Alliance etched into both temple sides of it.

She continued to refer to Shara as a Rebel, not a pilot of the New Republic – on Jakku, the New Republic didn’t really exist, or exist at all. A cold climate desert world only populated to pick at the bones of the remnants of the Imperial Fleet saw none of the legislation brought in by each Chancellor, and had immediately forgotten by Mon Mothma during her term. The Alliance held such a weight in the heart of Rey that she fantasised about it often – Shara was the first realisation, the first small piece of the Rebel Alliance to touch Jakku and her life. There was nothing around Rey on Jakku apart from loneliness and history and with Shara semi-opposite her she felt as if the former was melting before her eyes.

Rey drank in Shara’s glance, a pause bridging them together; the light of the heater lamp flickered in the corner of Rey’s eye as she saw Shara drinking a hearty gulp of the saved water. It wasn’t the best, but it was something to keep her hydrated.

“You wouldn’t...” Shara drifted a little, bobbing on the scavenged cushion.

“Happen to have something a little stronger?” Rey finished for her, leaning over the smaller table. “I’m just a scavenger; I couldn’t possibly be keeping liquor in here could I?”

Shara chuckled. “If I know my standard Imperial officer, I’d bet a finger or two that in one of those Star Destroyers you’ve been spelunking through, there was a bottle of Port in a Storm or Domaine de la Maison sur le Lac kicking about in his quarters,” she smiled. “And I’m certain that a woman as inquisitive as you would have saved it, huh Rey?”

The scavenger left the table, leaning into her own bunk and under the rack; she looked for a secret. It was a bundled up sack-lookin affair wrapped up in frayed and tattered cloths that looked similar to Rey’s own bed. From the cloths and sack overcoat, Rey pulled a small but slender bottle of what Shara knew to be Alderaanian White. It was a delicacy, and an extinct one at that with the destruction of all the distilleries on the planet. Shara licked her lips, beaming like a prowling Nexu in short range of ensnared prey.

“I’ve never known when I might open this... I’m not even really sure what it is,” Rey peeped, bringing it and two small metallic measure cups she had fashioned from blaster canon heat exchanger tips to the table.

“Alderaanian white; one of the best damn bottles hooch in the galaxy,” Shara boasted, taking the bottle and the cups off of her and pouring a good measure.

“Hooch?”

“Alcohol, honey. If you want to...”

* * *

The first sip to Rey’s lips had been liquid fire with some form of something even more stale and fermented than the often times rotten polystarch that had formed from the dust particles in her ration pack portions. But then once she swallowed, and again, the scavenger felt a supreme welling of something that felt like Coaxium in her chest. It was a liquid courage, and a particular piece of perspective she’d been missing her entire life. The edge was off after a cup or two and suddenly she and Shara were talking a lot more in between the battering the sandstorm was giving her roof. When Bey told a joke or two, Rey would laugh almost uncontrollably, unable to stop herself; and when the withered but gorgeous Rebel pilot would go off on a tangent about a battle or an operation for the Alliance, Rey would simply long and listen. Her elbows were on the table to hold up her head, her eyes enthralled with Shara’s darker skin with undertones of deep red and raven hair so curly and wild it was like the sails of a solar-liner.

“You said you were shot down before,” Rey was smiling, dipping her rations of the Alderaanian White at a much slower pace than her rugged counterpart.

Shara had taken off her gloves and her jacket so she was now boasting and talking in just a vest top with the athletic makeup of her upper and forearms bulging in the low light of the various heat lamps Rey had scattered around. She looked like a statuesque ornament in some temple or high-end estate owned by someone infinite richer than Rey could even fathom. Already, barely knowing or understanding Shara, Rey was enthralled by her so totally she began to subconsciously stare. Her eyes behaved on their own, fixed all over the pilot’s form; how lucky she was to have found her crashed in the desert. The threshold of the scavenger’s eyelids began to dip, her vision to fold. Shara continued on, retreading the steps and memories down a staircase that was the Battle of Endor, a smile on her face as she got to exiting Hyperspace. The more she continued the deeper Rey smiled.

“...Solo and his team took down the shield generator below us, and the next thing I hear in my ear is Admiral Ackbar to all ships. He orders Calrissian to commence the attack on the Death Star’s core... I’m in Green Squadron so I and the rest of the interceptor jocks are still on fighter mop up.”

“Is it true that an A-Wing could still outfly a TIE Interceptor?”

Shara winked, drinking again. “Oh, one-hundred per cent honey. They couldn’t even think fast enough let alone fly enough to a beat on us. Seriously, Imperial pilots were never worth anything near us. The first couple of kills I got during Endor; Arvel tilts left, lets his underside become exposed as he’s flying into the axis of a Star Destroyer – Wedge is on his tail, flying tail to keep him protected as the rest of the fleet tries to engage the destroyers.”

“Wedge?” Rey asked, confused, but then clicking as she remembered the details she’d memorised of the old Alliance. “Oh! Captain Antilles of Red Squadron, right?”

“Right,” Shara smiled, almost winking again; Rey rested on her fist, her eyes settling into observation over the scope of Shara’s body as she drank and told the story.

“Something amiss?” She heard Shara asking her, breaking form and character a moment as Rey suddenly realised she was staring right at her, the metal cup now empty of wine to her lips. “Staring at something particular, or just staring?”

“Um...”

Shara had cottoned on, of course she had – Rey had hardly been subtle in how her eyes had been walking all over and slowly admiring the older pilot’s body. Her upper arms were positively glistening in the low light, but what little of her shoulders and biceps Rey could see she adored. Shara’s vision mirrored her own, flashing back in dark circles of mellow eyes that combined with the slightly damp and mildly drunken heat of the living room to only entice both women. Lips wet, Rey was almost ready to leap over the small and dishevelled table and let her lusty inner scavenger run wild. Shara enticed her to give into the wilds of her lonely but sapphic nature, to indulge in what she no doubt wanted. The more Rey looked deeper at Shara, the more she found what she liked and nor could she help. It was totally inescapable; the scavenger lost herself in Shara’s brandy-tinted eyes.

The Rebel pilot leaned in, gripping the ornate bottle of the old Imperial officer and pouring two more rounds. With the crux of a sensual look her eyes, Shara leaned in closer, the small dose of what alcohol had seeped into Rey’s system dizzying her into a haze shrouded by smoke in the shape of the exposed portions of Shara’s body. Her lust lit a flame within Rey that now absorbed and burned her lonely fuel like an incredible charcoal Shara continued to feed her core.

“Must be lonely...” Shara mentioned, giving the side-eye to the ransacked and tarnished cot in the small compartment aft.

Based on her knowledge of the schematics she had studied in her youth, the older pilot could remember that section of the walker’s interior being close to the sanitary compartment. It made sense. Downing the last cup of Alderaanian white in a solid gulp, Shara breathed fire, coaxing Rey silently to do the same – the scavenger heaved a little, but beamed afterwards with the rush gushing into her stomach.

“Well... I mean...” She mumbled, trying to suddenly avoid Shara’s eyes the more they looked at her. When had she stopped talking about the Battle of Endor? What had happened to Rey since then? “Weren’t you... talking about Commander Antilles?” Rey shot back, trying to distract herself as she snatched the lid to the ancient wine and reached for Shara’s cup.

The withered but semi-drunken (they both were at this stage) pilot smiled, breathing an airy chuckle as she grabbed the cup and pulled it further away from Rey’s grasp. “By my account we were talking about you, _Rey_.” The way Shara muttered her name was constantly making the scavenger weak, the way she held the cup away from her now with her arms flexing in the spot of the low heat lamp made her all the worse. With the limited portion of the Alderaanian white making its way around her system and almost making her eyes shudder in her skull, Rey didn’t want to tax herself. But then she looked at Shara again and the way she was suddenly biting her plump and mocha-coloured lower lip. The small beads of sweat on her darkened flesh made Rey completely and totally immobile.

Their faces drew closer as the beat rang out between them and Shara relaxed. She crouched down again, landing the cup on the table for Rey to cover with her hand. Her fingers touched Shara’s and the maternal and mature interceptor jock smiled a little more, her shoulders rising and falling effortlessly like flora.

“I’m not much worth talking about... not like you,” she blushed, fingers trembling over Shara’s – she was old enough to be the scavenger’s mother, but Rey absolutely didn’t care.

She’d gotten the sense of the freedom of love in the galaxy a long time ago – Shara had been brought up on the new age of romantic freedom in a Post-Republic Theed. She was free to love, to love Kes, to love Norra if she had wanted to back in the arms of the Alliance, and each of Shara Bey’s lovers were equally as free. It was a lesson she lived by, being so free in the nonchalant and flamboyant nature of love affairs and she’d done her best to instil it in her son; even despite Kes’s best efforts to bring him up regimentally monogamous.

“Oh I think you are, Rey...” Yet again the way Shara spoke her name entangled Rey’s emotions and wild lusty desire, ensnaring her in a boon of exotic and celestial beauty. Shara was quite literally from the stars.

“You’re older...” Rey couldn’t help but reaffirm.

“I’d say old enough to be your mother... Does that bother you? If it does I can hand over this cup right now and let you sleep.”

Rey’s lips parted, the inkling of a gasp coming between them and making her teeth feel like they were fake from the adrenaline replacing the trace amounts of what little alcohol she’d drank. It was too late to fall back now; the position had been left naked, exposed. In a dogfight, Rey knew to kick in the afterburners, to deactivate her targeting computer and either eyeball a proton torpedo or to slam her thumbs and forefingers in the tiny triggers of the laser cannons. She had to press on, her core; her aching thighs begged her to. Age meant nothing to her, everything meant nothing – this was Jakku. This was lawless, this was her position, the ball in her court and Shara Bey was the most athletic and gorgeous creature the scavenger known as Rey had seen in her life up to that point. The sodden flesh between her legs announced itself as her fingers tightened around Shara’s and begged her to take advantage of her position. Lips wide open, Rey breathed life again.

“I don’t care,” she spoke softly, nothing more than a tantalising whisper.

“You’re sure?” Shara asked, ensuring to check; she’d die inside if Rey wasn’t totally devoted to the idea invisibly floating around them, their fingers tangling together around the cup until the metal faded underneath their joined hands. “We can stop...”

“You’re right, Shara... It gets _lonely_ here...”

“Have you,” now the A-Wing jock was losing herself, Rey essentially opening herself up to her on a semi-drunken whim. They were both hopeless now, enthralled and captured in the idea tangling them together in lusty knots all over. Rey’s hand almost slammed on the table as she gripped Shara’s with the other and closed her eyes, lips gaping. “Have you ever been with an older woman before..? Or even a man?”

Biting her bottom lip, breathless from the suspense, Rey swayed her head in a shake. “Never a man,” she confessed firmly, still gripping Shara’s hand. “Only a couple of women before,” she continued to confess.

“All younger... trading hands from Niima Outpost all looking for a quick one with a scavenger like me...”

“You’re so much more than a scavenger, Rey,” Shara whispered, breathy and helpless. With her free hand, the heated A-Wing pilot stroked the younger girl’s cheek, her wilds losing sense of things and blurring the lines between saviour and pilot. Before long they were of one mind, hand on cheek, Rey like clay in her palms.

Rey lost it completely. “Take me, Shara...”

“Blast, I thought you’d never ask, honey,” Shara sharply exhaled, shoving the whole table to the side and taking Rey’s lips for her own like she was assaulting in a siege.

They were muted, soft and yet a little gritty but exquisite to the taste. The afterglow of some of the Alderaanian white still staining them, Shara bit her now lover’s lower lip, earning a modest squeak from the intrepid scavenger. The more she tasted, the more she wanted and especially as Rey found her feet, grounding their hands into the bulkhead flooring and taking what she could of Shara’s body into her hands. They almost fought the more they kissed, the heating lamps seemingly becoming hotter – balling their hands into a combined fist and holding it down, Shara attempted to pin her partner to the ground, shrugging off the rags from Rey’s shoulder in an effort to expose her body. Her slender but still nimble shoulders were strong, Rey using strength she had held back to weigh in as leverage over their scrapping bodies. It was like the fight with the Vworkka again, Rey kissing with all her might the more Shara tried to restrict and top her. The three beautiful buns of her brown and ratty hair came loose, her short locks flowing all down her back and at the front of her shoulders the more Rey fought back to kiss at Shara’s plump and cushioned lips. She was the same and yet so much different to Rey herself; Shara was a pilot, true, but her body was so much softer. Her lips were sensational and always enticing Rey to try more and more – her hands scuffed but still nowhere near as much as Rey’s. All the splits and calluses from working on her own fighter for the Alliance had long since died and retreated under her bronzed and simply stunning skin.

“Calm down, honey,” Shara cooed as their energy tanked and the ribbons of rag fell from Rey’s form. The heat cooled off in seconds the more naked the scavenger became and instead of wrestling for control, Rey let Shara take her in her arms like a comforting lover.

They were pooled on the floor, the terrible cot that was Rey’s bed more than a few feet away and the table now stacked against the wall. They didn’t really care if they didn’t have comfort – Rey was more than used to have absolutely none and Shara as all too familiar with tossing around on a bulkhead deck (she and Kes had had more than a few fucks on the flight deck of whatever cruiser they were sleeping in during the Rebellion). If anything the older woman felt alive again to be throwing her lot in with a younger woman on the metal of an Imperial piece of kit. It felt almost humorous, and then she looked at all of that died and she was back in the room with her and only her.

Rey pushed them to part, pulling at her utility belt and ripping it from her waist. Without the support, her rags almost fell off of her form, leaving only her undershirt (which was somehow more rag-like than the rest of her dress), cloth wraps covering her forearms beyond her elbows and her pants, which soon left too. She looked as if she’d never been naked in the eyes of another partner before, her hair making her look older but adding another infinity to her beauty. The faded and muted freckles in her face made Shara swoon.

She reached forward, again caressing the tender flesh of her lover’s cheek and kissing her dearly, deeply. Both women’s hands darted at their waists, Rey’s bottom almost completely exposed as her breath hitched and her hands reaching the hem of Shara’s tank top. Nervous she lifted up, exposing her love affair to the opened and rather cold elements of the AT-AT’s interior, almost scared when Shara tugged to do the same.

But once again, Rey was splendidly gorgeous. Her bosom was small, perky but far closer to her chest than Shara’s. Not that the elder pilot cared. Her lover’s athletic frame rivalled her own only smaller and the more Shara was stunned, taking her in, the more Rey was blushing. It would not stand – Shara darted forward, kissing her again and holding her face dearly once more. Still, she traced the fledgling amount of alcohol on her tongue when she tasted it, as well as Rey’s signiature flavour that enticed her all the more. As Rey felt her lover hold her close, tonguing her mouth deeply and with a gentle fervour that tantalised, she felt her thighs clench around her naked lower half. With one hand free Shara joined her in complete nakedness (apart from the cloth wraps around both of Rey’s forearms that somehow made her appeal all the more to the intrepid older partner).

“Open your legs, _Rey_...”

She had no choice but to comply. The shakes took her thighs but with Shara’s guiding hand coming to between them, Rey felt herself opening her legs, the arousal between them stemming from what felt like ages ago flooding out as she felt her breath hitching. She was uncontrollable now, even as Shara’s guiding hand slipped deeper between her legs while her mouth distracted. Shara’s lips continued to emanate fervent grain to the lips, almost like a caffeine substitute that drove Rey into a mellow insanity.

Shara leaned into her, pushing Rey to hold herself up with one hand as the other darted instinctively to where her lover was touching her. Her sex, her arousal, the wetness consumed her as Shara’s fingers blended into her desire, finding the opening between lower lips and coaxing a deep and intense struggle from Rey’s throat. She moaned, a most sublime melody of heated and bereft struggles with the incredible sensations beading through her wet sex. Shara held the back of her neck, sensing fatigue almost immediately.

“Lay back...”

“Wh... Why?” Rey asked, gasping for air as she gripped Shara’s wrist. “Don’t stop...” She begged.

The pilot chuckled, a little primal with the hint of dominant sexual desire. “Oh, I’m not stopping, honey... Lay back, and spread ‘em wider for me,” she asked of the scavenger, kissing her lip, then her chin and finally her neck, wet with a layer of sweat from earlier. All the while Shara drew centric and gorgeous-feeling circles around Rey’s pearl with delicate yet experienced fingers which clued Rey into just how understanding her lover was. What had she stepped into? When had the conversation of Endor died? Rey didn’t care, her gratification was making her limps shake all along the bulkhead, her lower folds continuing to soak as Shara touched her entrance.

She laid back, Shara still guiding her down and using their pile of discarded clothes as a cushion for the younger pilot’s back and shoulder blades. It was hardly the most comfortable she’d been, but it wasn’t that far from bunking in her cot every night four thousand times. She held her lover’s hand as Shara’s beautiful face disappeared again. The circles didn’t stop, but slowed as Rey moaned all the more.

“Don’t stop!”

“Spread ‘em for me, honey...” Shara whispered to her, kissing her inner thigh. The tender flesh of Rey’s legs shuddered at Shara’s kiss, and she did as asked, almost nervous again as the kisses continued but lowered.

Another source of wetness came to Rey, warm and enveloping, taking in her arousal and licking it sweetly with a fair-weathered tongue the scavenger already knew. The sensations were almost explosive to her body. Flames licked up the frame of her form, making her fingers curl as her legs struggled not to wrap around Shara’s back. She couldn’t help her fingers wriggling down her frame trying to get to the head nestled neatly down below. Sensually, even greedily, Rey’s fingers knotted Shara’s clean and silky curls, holding her down with what little dominance Rey could muster. Even still, Shara operated on her own, following her on path as she took in all the wetness seeping from her lover’s arousal as she could get. Along the grooves of Rey’s sodden folds she found a pattern, forcing the scavenger’s chest to rise and fall with a regular rhythm.

Finding Rey’s beading pearl, coaxing out of its adorable hood with her tongue was a simple task; hearing the younger woman almost scream with ecstasy when she licked around in petite circles was bliss, reminiscent of her affairs on Theed with girls her own age shortly before and after joining the Alliance. Rey’s sex in her mouth was like nothing she’d felt in a long time due to her middling age. To eat her out, to taste her pleasurable lust in a warm and sweet liquid form was her own brand of ecstasy along with the Alderaanian white.

“ _Shara..._ ” She heard her lover’s lips pass out, Rey’s body squirming with every inch of her sex that Shara indulged. Already she felt tense, even bereft with the pleasure rising up her frame.

Begging for more and her own arousal sodden, Shara gripped Rey’s tender thighs, needing to taste her deeper. With eager fingers wanton and edging to penetrate, Shara moaned into the needy flesh before her lips. Rey tasted _so_ good she could hardly stop.

“Shara... I’m...”

Already? Shara bit her lip, kissing her lover’s inner thigh and smiling – she knew what to do about fixing the A-Wing now. A devilish but smouldering idea formed in the back of her mind as she licked evermore, dipping her tongue even deeper into the slew of wetness soaking Rey’s folds. It was almost dreamlike, the aroma even palpable and desirable.

“ _I’m coming!_ ” Rey almost screeched, but Shara held her firmly, enough to catch any and all that followed into her mouth. She wasn’t ready or wanting to finish yet, Rey tasted too well, her body was too endearing. Shara was too uncompromising to stop. Something flashed in her eye, like a layer of glass over the pleasure burning in her own sex as Rey crashed into climax around her lips, her orgasm tasting on her withered and well-trained tongue.

She’d get that A-Wing fixed now; Rey would bend to what she’d offered. Even as the a flash of Endor rippled across Shara plain of vision she knew that negotiations wouldn’t be as short as Rey would like. Negotiations had only seriously begun. And Shara knew that both of them wanted more. Much more.


	4. Negotiations

Shara awoke with the sensation of motion swaying her to and fro with the cockpit glass stained and obscured by the remnants of smoke from the dashboard. Her stick was torn off and in her lap; the odd spark flurried out of the various screens and panels of the dashboard.

At first she wanted to panic, to hyperventilate as she dared not move. From the swaying of the whole cradle that the ship had become, Shara could only guess that she had landed in the tree-line. How? She couldn’t say, the last few moments of re-entry had been a complete blur and when the retro rockets had fired on their own, Shara felt her head almost smash through the cockpit and then back through her chair. She’d been unconscious for the rest of it. Feeling her face, she detected the sodden patch of blood down her left temple and then more dripping onto her lips from no doubt a broken nose. The rest of her was fine – no damage to her legs among the crushed crumple zone of empty fuel tanks beyond the cockpit, nor had the pedal space trapped her feet. The only thing else that was hurting was her neck and chest. 

She tried to move, to gauge the stability of the landing nest the Endor trees has become for her downed bird. The radio spewed static into her ear, forcing Shara to remove her flight cap and let her wild hair down completely. Her left temple stung a bit, but for her graces, the A-Wing was secure for the moment, even as she sensed movement all around her.

The fighter was safe and stable in the treetops but Shara knew the feeling of presence around her – her mind bounced to Imperials. Stormtroopers! Closing all around her; they must have seen the falling star that was her A-Wing covered in security gel-layer for re-entry and had decided to kill the pilot, or ensure death. She must have landed either close to one of their bases, landing platforms, or lower down the elevation of the alpine veranda than she’d first expected. Either way, they were scouring for her crash site in the branches. Shara lurched back, reaching for her blaster pistol at her hip. They’d only send one to lift the pilot’s canopy, not more. They couldn’t afford more with a battle going on, even if Shara had landed far from Solo’s coup. The sound of voice approached and Shara snapped her weapon from its holster.

Holding it close to her face, she panted; sweat beaded across her upper lip and she sighed heavily for as much breath as she could. Only nineteen, her veins were on fire, her blood beyond boiling point and rushing all around her body as she struggled to remain silent. She remembered what Wexley had told her, ready to embark into her Y-Wing on _Home One_.

_Hope that the Force wants you alive..._

Something huddled around the cockpit and the whole fighter budged little by little. Shara squeezed her eyes shut and tried to keep them closed but her body convulsed – she was going to vomit any moment, she could tell.

Trying to get a hold of herself, Shara gripped the trigger of her pistol with both hands and dared not let go. As soon as the unlucky Stormtrooper popped the lid of her ship, he would meet a blast bolt and as would any of the others who attacked her. She had survived getting shot down during the Battle of Endor; there was no way she was going to die now. Kes was somewhere and she already wanted to find him, to feel safe with him – her nineteen-year-old brain was tackled with hyped panic that she thought she was heading directly for an aneurism.

The cockpit buckled and Shara wanted to die already – the glass rose up and before she could shoot she clocked the lack of white plasteel armour. They weren’t Stormtroopers, none of them, for there were about four of the little creatures stood on and around the smoking husk of the A-Wing.

Shara dropped her gun, looking around at the four or so cuddly bears that had gathered around her crashed fighters. They were all small, oddly tribal with headdresses and stoned sticks that didn’t look like they could kill or wound anything. But still the little bears brandished them as weapons of war and the hunt. Shara cautiously and respectfully raised her hands, until a fifth bear joined the group. They were drastically smaller than the others, whomever this new bear was; the cocking of its head told Shara that they weren’t dangerous, none of them were. As a group the teddy bears lowered their spears and the smallest one reached for her with their hand; their fur pelt was a browner than the others, and their headdress was a fall auburn with some dangling pieces of bark or something. Whatever their name, they seemed to be the most inquisitive, curious of the group of natives. That was what they must have been, all of the cute and adorable bears, the natives to Endor. These creatures must have been what General Solo had reported was giving the Empire’s Legion more than enough trouble.

Almost laughing, incredulous towards this remarkable turn of events, Shara took the smaller bear’s hand and as a team of five little creatures, they pulled her from the wreckage of her A-Wing and guided her from the small nest in the trees where she had crashed. They made their way across branches precariously, no sounds or signs of battle ringing out around them. Either they were far away from the shield generator bunker, or the battle was over anyway. The only thing that told Shara that there was an Imperial presence left on the forest moon was an entourage of three more Inferno Squadron TIE/ln fighters zooming overhead and breaking for orbit.

Was Iden Versio in one of them? Shara knew of her, knew the bounty the Alliance would be putting on her smug head after the Battle of Endor would be over. They were already almost to the forest floor by the time the signiature howl of the TIEs screeched overhead, distracting Shara to the sky for when it happened. She had expected to see it from orbit, up close and around the perimeter of the Alliance capital ships around Endor, but seeing it from the planet’s surface in the arms of the locals was somehow just as good.

Up above, like a supernova in the sky, the large shadow cast by the Second Death Star suddenly erupted into inferno – the sound shuddered the trees all around her and the teddy bears. There was a spark and a flash of light from inside to out of the super weapon and then it was just as suddenly no more. In a bursting explosion to consumed almost the entire skybox, the Second Death Star detonated into a huge ball of flame and smoke. The solid orb was no longer there, only the largest fireball Shara had ever seen in her life. It was gone.

And along with it, Lord Vader, and Emperor Palpatine himself; they were dead, the Death Star too and any hope the Empire had of keeping the authoritarian control of the galaxy they’d had for a foul twenty two years. It was all going up in smoke right above her, shooting debris everywhere. Shara felt such a rush in her heart – something par relief, part ecstasy and part thrilling inspiration. She’d never felt more alive in her life, on an alien world surrounded by aliens that were positively adorable. And the Empire was dead, dying in front of her eyes. The _Executor_ was even gone too; the Empire was reduced to a crumbling fleet hopefully running for their lives totally leaderless.

“Shara?”

Bey turned around, looking down from the Death Star’s balling ruin to see the face of her lover – it was Kes Dameron, blood over the side of his forehead like it covered hers, with a charred hole in his camouflaged scrubs and a bewildered look on his twenty-something face with a shock plastered on it that he was bewildered to see her. She was shocked too, there he was, all in one piece, a little worse for the wear but alive and by the looks of things, a hero. Shara ran to him, leaving the bears and wrapping her arms around his neck with the last of her strength. Kes dropped his rifle and helmet to the wayside and hugged back protectively.

“What the Force are you doing here?” Kes asked her, kissing her lips and wiping the smudge smoke from her dirty cheeks. Shara was already crying, looking possibly even younger than nineteen going on twenty. Kes was a couple of years older than her.

“I got shot down... Gel impact layer... Stars, you’re alive! Kes!” Shara babbled her youth and relief gripping her as she pulled him in by his rugged collar and snogged him fiercely again, not wanting to let him go away from her lips. He tasted awful, like the battle had blasted his face but his stupid masculinity was hers, he was hers, and she wanted him badly now. “Oh, Kes...”

“I can’t believe you’re alive, Shara. By the Force.”

“Me? I can’t believe _you’re_ alive, you nerfherder.”

“I’d say he’s more than alive, ma’am,” another voice spoke, joining them. It was old and familiar to both of them, but not within the Rebel Alliance. The man owning it was old, his flesh tanned and his beard totally white and bespoke. “Ma’am, is this man yours?”

“He wishes, or he will be after this...”

“Commander Rex, ma’am, Kes here saved my life today – I was cornered by Stormtroopers and this man flew in on a tree vine with a squad of Ewoks to pull me out of the fire. Take my advice, pilot; don’t let this one get away,” Rex told her, Shara realising what that name meant in historical terms the moment he declared himself. Rex patted Kes on the shoulder, rustled his hair and offered Shara a firm handshake, which she took without any hesitation. “You’re a gods-damn hero, Dameron, thank you.”

“The thanks are mine, Commander, I’m glad I was here,” Kes even blushed, Shara running her fingers through his buzz cut of crappy hair too.

“Kes Dameron...” Shara began.

“Yes, Shara Bey? You in need of another Rebel jarhead?”

“Perhaps,” she grinned, playing coy and running her hands all over him like he was one of the Ewoks he mentioned. She never wanted to let him go now as the Second Death Star crumbled and burned into oblivion above them. “Were you doing anything after this war?” She asked.

Kes’s eyes almost popped. She’d yet to ask him a question like that, given how long they’d been unofficially tied together, often sharing the same bunk from ship to ship and spending any R&R they could have together, of which there was tremendously little. But the look in Bey’s young but flirty eyes told him she was actually being serious and living a little given that she had been shot down moments ago.

“Well, I _did_ have some plans to move to Chandrila, I hear that’s gonna be the first seat of the New Republic, thought maybe I could flaunt my skills to Chancellor Mothma...”

“Hmmm... Maybe I could change your mind,” Shara giggled a little, still holding his collar. “There’s a nice little settlement getting set up on Yavin 4... Providing we’re alive to go there... Marry me?”

* * *

Looking up, Shara could see that the looming shadow of the destroyer had left the Jakku system. They hadn’t pursued her to the planet surface, which meant whoever was using bastardised Imperial technology and ship design were either extremely sloppy in their kill confirmation or did not think a single A-Wing pilot was worth their time in making sure was dead. Either way Shara counted her blessings as she helped Rey load the modules that were deeply beyond repair into the netting of her homemade speeder. Shara hoped her tight beam communicae had reached New Republic space already and that she would not be stuck here; still, the idea she’d had the night before, her tongue deep inside of the gorgeous scavenger girl played on her mind.

She had nothing to pay Rey with for repairs to the A-Wing – that was, nothing except her body.

“Help me move the motivator,” Rey distracted her, the bulging muscles of her athletic biceps making Shara bite her lip again. “You’re still staring at me...”

“As if you _weren’t_ staring at me while I got dressed this morning?” Shara countered, knowing that between her naked abdomen rippled with muscle and the curvature of her pilot’s bottom (which was sleek and lean and an indulgent personal pride of Shara in how toned she had managed to maintain it into her forties), Rey was practically drooling as they dressed.

“You took twice as long as it did to get clothed...”

“Meaning you looked twice as long as long at my body than I did at yours – relax, honey, there’s nothing to be ashamed off.”

“I’ve known you for a whole night and let you touch me like I was your plaything...”

“Didn’t hear you telling me to stop, Rey,” Shara pressed her luck, knowing the younger girl was simply conflicted, or outright lying to play hard to get. Her rough exterior and guarded heart was under lock and key all over again. She hadn’t been that drunk at all last night, neither of them had; it was real, she had reached orgasm for real all over Shara’s tongue. In fact the older pilot could still taste the scavenger’s climax in the very back of her throat.

“Maybe I should tell you to stop right now while you’re behind, Shara. What if I tell you to pack your fighter repairs up your arse and leave you out here in the desert for the Vworkka?” Rey pouted, letting go of the motivator and the netting and reaching for her staff.

Shara was behind her before she could blink, pulling at her waist and slamming her to the side of the speeder stuck hovering over the sand. The contact as hard in Rey’s back but Shara was not taller or stronger than her. Rey used her leverage like she had learned from Zuvio and his deputies when she was a pre-teen and turned the tables on Shara like the A-Wing pilot was absolutely nothing. Suddenly Shara was pinned against the speeder, the ferocity behind the hand shoving Rey’s staff into her collarbone and the scavenger’s free grip holding Shara’s right hand against the orange plating. Bey was helpless, gripping the staff almost pressing into her neck.

Rey was fierce, but the hint of a playful smile lost her this altercation. Shara knew she actually still had her as she had in the night. If she were a predator, an alpha of a primitive species, Shara would be able to smell the pheromones the younger girl was swimming in no doubt. She was still wet and Shara too. This was play; rough, but play.

Loosening her grip on the staff, Shara blew her flame a taunting kiss, knocking Rey’s left ankle out from under her and tipping her balance over sideways. Rey lost her footing, and the staff disappeared from Shara’s neck, within a moment into the older woman’s hands as she tipped Rey onto her back. The staff fell to the floor along with Rey, her expression incredible as she fell almost in slow motion. Shara’s hand came to her back to gently let her glide on the strength of the former Rebellion pilot as she fell too until they were on the sand, the pair of them. Rey was on her back, sand surrounding her with Shara straddling on top of her, feeling the small then the side of her back and holding her almost gentlemanly. Then all at once she pinned Rey down, and could not let her up.

“You finished?”

“Are you?” Rey countered, still a little rough.

“Negotiations have only just begun, I’d say, Rey...”

“You’re talking about last night,” Rey cooed, still almost pouting and showing the youth of her twenty-year-old self. Shara could see much of herself at twenty within Rey, especially without Kes. At that point she’d just asked the man to marry her but he always drove her insane.

Rey relented, and silence took them as a mild breeze rolled across the sand dune, making the sheet still over a partial amount of the A-Wing billow in the background. Rey and Shara simply looked at each other in the arid silence, until Rey breathed, making Shara’s hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. For a girl half her age, Rey was still perfect in Shara’s eye, incredibly sensual and sexually demure in a way that made the more dominant pilot parched for her body and her mind. Rey’s lips were also incredibly intoxicating – looking at her in a corpse pose, Shara wanted to kiss Rey’s lips again. The scavenger evidently had other plans as she reached for her companion’s hand and tugged the glove off of it. The breeze made the little exposed space of Rey’s upper arms bristle, goose bumps standing on end to the alien chill of the otherwise warm mid afternoon. 

Pulling on the naked hand of the older pilot, Rey’s motionless and transfixed eyes basically begged – _touch me_. She magically chanted it in her mind, without her lips parting again but Shara could catch the drift she was sliding her way. These were the negotiations, terms of service, of payment. Shara wanted to flirt some more, to play the bitch, coy, whatever she could to enhance the experience; within Rey’s brandy-coloured eyes and wanton demeanour, there was a deviant wanting to come out and play. Shara wanted to play too, but wanted to secure her position first.

“Fix my ship...” Shara sternly commanded.

Rey’s eyebrow slanted, cocking one over the other before she shuffled in the hardy sand and sat up, still holding Shara’s hand down the length of her tummy. “What are you going to be pay me with? I can’t do it for free...”

“You know what I’m offering... You said it yourself.”

“Did I?” Rey asked slyly, her hand guiding Shara’s down to the hem of her baggy pants still taut with sand particles. Gingerly, fingers slipped inside and Shara paused.

“Fix my ship, and I can pay you with this... More of this, more than last night even. Rey, you said you were lonely,” Shara offered, leaning over as her free hand held Rey dearly and the other found her mount. With relaxed and experienced fingers again, Shara found Rey’s desire, tenderly trickling along her pearl with the faintest of fingertips, the lightest of touches. Deeper into Rey’s eyes she looked the more of that message, that chant she found.

_Touch me_.

To force her hand, Shara reached the depth of Rey’s hot need, her liquid lust and fingered delicately for but a moment. She had a plan, her own lust beginning to soak as they messed about in the sand. As soon as she heard the first melodious and delicate moan from the beautiful scavenger, Shara ceased all interactions, leaning over Rey and kissing her forcefully, letting her moan into her mouth.

“Fix my ship... And I’ll let you come again and again...”

Rey hesitated, her fingers gripping around Shara’s wrist as her freehand held her hardy shoulder leaning over. As support, Shara was stable, and now Rey was in a haze, needing more again. “Blast you... Okay...”

“Thank the Force.”

“Why?”

“Because now I’m crazy for you all over again – at least the negotiations were short.”


	5. Service

The terms had been set; Rey bit her bottom lip as Shara shrugged off her jumpsuit again and stood before in her tank top and khakis, later even snapping the belt off until the older Rebel stood barefoot and semi-naked.

“Off...” She ordered, her tone a lot more direct than how she had behaved the previous night.

There was no sandstorm now, no wine or any alcohol to speak of, nor any limitations on what Shara Bey felt comfortable and excused in doing. Rey had outright given her free reign as she slipped off her baggy sand pants and pressed herself against the wall. The durasteel hull of the AT-AT’s interior was already warm, the cold climate outside hotter than expected as Rey clawed its metallic structure while Shara tormented her. Pulling her tank down by its raggedy hem to reveal her barely shrouded chest made the scavenger’s libido swirl already, the palpable heat of their deal rising to the ceiling and making Rey more than a little distracted. Her own hands, the arms of which covered in her cloth wraps still, slowly and almost invisibly raked down her barely clothed body to between her athletic legs. She watched helplessly as Shara taunted her more with the supple flesh of her ample bosom. Before Rey could see it all, Bey denied her, letting her top cover her again before spreading her legs and starting the process all over again with her lower half of her experienced both.

Rey was out of breath in an instant, desperately trying to control herself against the wall but Shara had her dead to rights in the intricacies of their financial agreement. The intent of the A-Wing jock was like penned iron behind her eyes, a contract of sale, a bill of all the things that Rey had agreed to put on the table for their ritual. That’s essentially what their playful exchange had already become – Rey was little more than an intrepid and willing participant in whatever Shara had spontaneously planned, but now Bey was altering the tone and the texture of their dance.

She brushed back her illustrious and handsome locks of oily black and tied them behind her crown with a snapped bobble, yet a single strand escaped and flowed down her forehead. In the low and diminished light of the small shack-like domicile, Shara’s skin looked perfect; she was bathed in a golden bronze, the dark overtones of her flesh catching and reflecting the light as if she was a mirror. The smallest beads of sweat rippled down her brow.

The bead glistened in the reflection of the low light, tantalising and coaxing Rey’s devotion from where she stood, the bare naked flesh of her exposed rump pressed into a rusty metal coat. The scavenger purred from across the room, forcing Shara to smile, admiring the work performed thus far.

“Liking what you see, huh, Rey?” Shara taunted, her tongue licking the front of her teeth. With age came experience, and a sex appeal that oozed off of the mother figure like a slick coat of paint.

Rey was enthralled, a prisoner depraved as she watched Shara slither her fingers down her front to between her splendid thighs. They were both doing it, mirroring the other, albeit Rey a little more timidly as if hanging on Shara’s permission to touch herself. Her lips parted, tongue trembling as if to speak but at the sight of Shara slipping her sleek fingers around either side of her underwear, dropping them to her ankles, Rey was rendered silent again.

Shara made for her, darting across the small length of Rey’s living room with her panties left where she’d stood. With one hand snapping forward and hoisting up her lover’s soft and muted chin, Shara reached down with the other, helping Rey close the gap between her fingers and her already dripping lust. The older woman chuckled a little as she detected the drips of wetness down below, her lips gently kissing Rey in a soft peck.

“You’re wet already, I see,” Shara taunted again. “Hungry for it, right? Been waiting for this kind of play for a long time, am I right?”

“Maybe a little,” Rey shot back, finding her feet and remembering she had some resolve in her body. The lack of freedom in her everyday life made it easy for her to submit sexually, and given how powerful and strong-fisted Shara was demonstrating herself to really be, Rey slipped into a submissive side of her persona even more profoundly than she intended. A singular bead of sweat dragged down her crested collarbone to disappear into her cloth top and her fingers trembled as Shara dragged them closer to her begging sex.

And it was begging as much as Rey’s mind and lips were. Shara pecked them again with her own, smelling the aroma wafting from down between her submissive lover’s thighs. She’d licked it the previous night, tasted all of the release of Rey’s juicy desire, the flowing rush of her orgasm when she peaked. Now Shara could afford to have fun, and dish it out all the same – she ribbed the lower dip of Rey’s naked folds and collected an eager amount of slick on the tips of her fingers. Eye contact maintained, Shara taunted Rey with another peck, licking up the smeared moisture spread across her two fingers and savouring the taste. Separate from the texture of the previous night, Shara detected a change in the scavenger’s flavour – a mild citrus combined with the silky smoothness to make for a divine experience. Bey couldn’t help but moan into her own fingers, savouring the relish and the tang of her lover’s slow and gradual release. She couldn’t get enough but knew she would have to temper her craving as she gripped Rey’s wrist again with her offhand.

“Follow me, okay?” She asked, meaning to tell.

Rey nodded, her tongue a little wily and wanton for another kiss as Shara dragged her fingers back down. With her offhand she made Rey’s sturdy fingertips dive between her lower folds; with merely her eyes Shara commanded Rey to follow her tender and guiding movements as she mirrored the position of the scavenger’s hand at her sex. Shara’s was a little fuzzy, the gentle and beautiful short buzzes of her sexual pelt to direct the dive her hand, and suddenly they were both touching themselves.

“Come on,” Shara egged Rey on, the tone of her forthcoming and soft tones shifting a little with now guttural intent as she began to finger rather desperately between the furry and soaking folds of a needy desire. “Touch yourself,” she continued. An equally as needy kissed pressed from lip to lip. Rey almost drank her dominant’s mouth, salivating her semi-sweaty taste and musk as it precipitated into the stale and rusty air.

The climate made it worse, Shara was on top of her and refusing to let her go as Rey joined her and fell into step and rhythm. Bey was merciless, hardy and topping energy pressing Rey into the wall as her legs seemingly wrapped around her to bind her there. The A-Wing pilot was like a constructor, some snake or viper descending on her uneventful and chaste domicile that had been untouched an unblemished for something near a decade. Rey lay across the rusted wall scattered with uniform numbers and made love with Shara’s tempo, touching her slick sex to her every word, and each word she didn’t need to utter. Every so often she’d whisper another comment and Rey would take it like a commandment. She soaked in all her treatment like a mentally endowed sponge, learning all Shara’s techniques for her own as she lay and touched.

Rubbing sensual and greedy circles around her throbbing folds and desperate clitoris, Rey squirmed against Shara’s body, trying to break free before she turn to stone. Shara had other ideas – she wanted Rey petrified for her own, their sexual energy turning to intoxicating fire in their bodies.

Shara encompassed all of Rey’s vision and vice versa, each keeping the other going and her body burning, making love more closely in each other’s mind. Neither could help getting closer, becoming one as they touched their desire, swirling each other’s sex – Shara smiled the whole while, licking her teeth with powerful ownership of Rey’s impending climax.

Whomever came first lost the small wager they’d silently made between each other.

“Use this,” Shara breathed, snatching Rey’s fingers away from her cunt and kissing the wetness off of their tips within a moment. She was almost drunk off of the sex now become airborne between them in the little cove of the sitting room they’d thus far dedicated.

Suddenly between Rey’s thighs Shara stomped her leg, offering a thick and plump thigh for the scavenger to grind herself upon, vigorous flesh to make love to and grow closer to climax – from Shara she could practically taste the gushing wetness.

“Use _me_...” Shara told her ward, her malleable partner, her submissive saviour.

The rush of having the control and the power of this session of play reminded Shara of being in the pilot’s seat of her tarnished ARC-170 starfighter (of which only she and Norra Wexley had flown for the Rebel Alliance in its ‘heyday’). The intensity was similar, holding Rey with the same fervour and desperately touching the soft beading of her throbbing clitoris with a distinctly familiar passion as she had held the bucket of old Republic bolts numerous times on aggressive recognisance missions. Rey was her current objective, Shara losing herself as the gorgeous scavenger equally lost herself grinding on her naked leg, absolutely soaking it. Shara could feel her lover’s release tricking down her leg, drips down to her ankles as Rey rubbed her cunt against the athletic flesh all the while.

She hummed, biting her gritty but delicate lip as Shara eyed her back - her entire focus honing in on every movement, every subtlety of the ragged mechanic, Shara breathed harshly, pushing her thigh further up to meet the ever-flowing slickness of Rey’s desperate folds.

Increasingly, with every grind back and forth Shara matched her lover’s movements inch for inch, pace perfectly mirrored with her tender fingers. Shara’s body sang for her, reaching a height of sexual euphoria and pleasant ecstasy that she had not felt in years. Not even ever this warm and hot – her blood seemed to be boiling as Rey got herself off against her leg like some tamed pet. Shara’s eyes opened from the overwhelming pang of amazement, seeing Rey still looking at her, watching the rising and falling of her voluminous chest, fawning at it with her young and doe-like eyes.

It forced Shara to jolt, to move in a way almost inhuman as she fumbled and batted at her still-throbbing sex, soaked with wetness flowing like a drinking fountain. Rey’s lips looked cotton-mouthed, her tongue mothballed as she gasped for and for a drink. Her older and dominant partner provided; standing up straight and pulling her tank over her bundled up hair and fair, not even olden face. Shara’s bronze flesh glistened again in the afterglow of the terribly low light. Sweat dripped down her chin, onto her now naked breasts that served only now to distract and tantalise Rey all the more. Her hands wanted to dive right in and grip her controller by the chest, to feel all of her ample bosom.

“Go right ahead,” Shara settled the nervous scavenger. “I can see you looking...”

“Your body is just...” Rey trembled, her hands darting while shaking to Shara’s breasts and feeling all she could. It was as if the last night hadn’t happened at all, and Rey was getting a whole new exposure to Shara’s frame. “You’re gorgeous...”

“Glad somebody thinks so,” Shara smiled, her hand returning to her soft and moistened sex, feeling all up inside of her entrance and making herself moan.

They caught eyes once more, transcending their physical confines and traversing the wider galaxy together at a speed close to that of light. Rey’s lips couldn’t come together again, she looked parched. But she looked close – Shara could tell. Could tell, because her own legs began to shake, even worse as Rey’s pace grinding up and down her left thigh increased all over again as she bucked desperately to come for the older controller.

Shara leaned forward. One hand pinned them both against the numbers wall while she continued to fervently flick her clitoris back and forth between insertions of her entrance. The sensations shooting out all around her soaking core made Shara feel a swath of heat rippling down her bodice.

“I’m... I’m so close...” Rey squirmed.

“Don’t stop.”

“I’m not... _Stars_. You feel so good underneath me,” she tried to smile, her flesh looking as hot to the touch as the partner’s. Rey was turning red.

“Remember our agreement,” Shara had to remind her, the pinning hand on the wall coming to cup her face as they both raggedly panted onward. Both became a rolling wrecking ball heading headlong into a trap, a snare, a booby bounty of orgasm and climax coming at mach speed that was gradually bordering on the precipice of inescapable. “No coming until I say so,” Shara beamed.

Rey gasped, moaning loudly into the air and knocking her head back. The older pilot’s guiding hand moved quickly to the three buns her hair wrapped into, protecting her crown from the impact of the wall as she knocked it back with some force. Rey looked to be taking no more of her, her shoulders were flexing round and round as she tried to distract her body with itself. She threatened to falter as Shara pressed her own sex onward, still rubbing in a furious circle as she rocked Rey on her leg, her thigh now almost streaked in her lover’s wet release.

“Don’t come!”

“Please...”

“Not until I say,” Shara told her with a greedy smile.

Rey shunted, moaning with almost white-hot resentment as her lover bucked her further on her slick thigh. “Please... Shara!”

“Please, what?”

“Please, may I come?”

“You may not.”

“Shara, please! Please, please, may I come!”

“You may not.”

Another guttural groan, her core tightening into a spooled coil trying to hold back the flood of climax that was battering at her door. Rey could not control it at all anymore. Her lover coaxed her to grind against her thigh, all the more lathering her abundant wetness over the soft and tanned flesh. Rey’s hands darted to her lover’s wrist, the one buried between her legs, still trying to match the pace she had set for her submissive scavenger.

“Please, Shara. Please may I come now?”

Bey paused, pinching her private flesh a little and gripping her lover’s neck. A primal rumble came from her throat, her eyes fixated on the younger woman like a flesh-eating Gundark let loose from some cage. She gritted her teeth for a split second and held Rey’s neck tightly, almost forcefully. She wanted more – she’d get it. She was going to lick the submissive’s cunt clean before their trade agreement had fulfilled its mandate. She’d have her A-Wing fixed and her libido filled; Rey’s darling eyes were almost sparkling as she raggedly pushed her slick sex along the line of bone under the fine flesh of her leg.

“Come here,” she ordered of the beautiful scavenger. “You may come now, Rey...”

Shara claimed her lips, not taking anything for an answer to delay her. As she tasted Rey’s fine lip, the aftershock of her climax rattled her body, passing through to Shara as she tasted her. Rey’s legs wanted to give out, that much Shara could feel against her own as the riddling of orgasm totally tackled the younger woman’s body. The older pilot removed her thigh and reached for Rey’s waist, wrapping her arm around her midriff to stabilise her. With the rest of her strength, Shara had to move her reeling lover, taking her to the makeshift cot Rey called a bed and setting her down. All the while she kissed her deeply, letting the smaller mechanic ride out her orgasm in a wrapped throw of love and affection. As hardy as Shara was with her sexual control, it was all the in name of pleasure, of a deep aesthetic and feral attraction they’d body decided upon and consented to.

Now Rey was spent, the second half of Shara’s terms of service came to effect. Their mutual masturbation would lead to intimate noodling; Shara Bey’s senses were on fire as she briefly caught her own private climax. She came hard and fast when Rey had done, not reaching anything like it since her days with Kes in the cradle of the Alliance.

It had been much like this then too – a couple of Rebels trying to get close or get off in a cruiser or destroyer crammed with other Rebels, all wanting to fight or fuck when the Empire wasn’t at an arm’s length to shoot down or blow up. Tension was an easy mistress. Shara closed her eyes and breathed out, holding Rey close.

And suddenly they were snogging deeply and intensely all over again, Rey wrapping her legs over Shara’s as they threw away Rey’s trashy bedding.

They rested a while, a small and infinitesimal while to loosely hold each other as each woman reeled from the force and rattling effects of her orgasm. Rey looked completely tapped, all of her faculties worn out and her body left in little pieces – she opened her eyes, still breathing heavily with her body covered in a small layer of sweat and smiled cheekily at Shara from across the length of the pillow. Shara caught her glance, the mess of wild black hair falling over her face. Rey’s hair was coming undone too; a knotting calamity of strands of deep brown hair came out from the three buns she tied it back into. The scents of their hot and hefty bodies clouded the air, but neither cared.

Crossing the gap with her panting coming to a close, Shara kissed her lover’s forehead, enveloping her in a movement and all-encompassing cocoon of love and affection. Rey took to it like a moth to flames, attracted to it like a thrall under some form of supernatural spell. When Shara Bey kissed her face, Rey’s hands magnetised her wrists and fingers again, and she laughed from the affection. They lips soon found each other in a nearly completely dark dance under the tragic lights of Rey’s shambled home.

“More...” Rey whispered, almost grumbling as she tried to shift all her body weight at once. Shara pinned her back into the soft tatters of the bed with no mattress.

“Relax,” the older pilot calmed her with a change in the tone of her breath. “Lay down, honey...”

“But I want more, Shara... I want more.”

“You _are_ a needy girl, aren’t you?”

The scavenger simply smiled, closing her darling eyes and nodding more than just a little. Her cheeks reddened again and her flesh became warmer to the touch when Shara kissed her cheek once again, doting on the darling and submissive woman. Rey’s breath hitched and she felt her partner’s hands coming around her legs again. She jerked, but Shara made her rest again, holding her softly.

“Stay down, but move your legs, like this,” she moved them for her, shifting Rey’s legs to the side with her hips and wanting to part them. “Open your legs for me, honey, just relax.”

“What are you doing?” Rey squirmed again, her ankles firmly in the hands of her companion as Shara parted her legs and slipped herself between them. Suddenly they were sandwiched together, perfectly slotted against one another – Rey was reeling all over again when she detected the now cool and soft brush of Shara’s sex against her own and her hands darted to the mound of her lover’s navel. “Shara...”

The pilot was calming, her touch now sensual instead of dominant; certainly there was still an overwhelming sense of dominant ownership in her hand, but she was more calming now, gentle. She cooed Rey back down, holding her hands and knitting fingers together as she shuffled to remain comfortable against the younger submissive. Rey’s naked sex felt ethereal against her own, the lack of a pelt and still present slickness lining her lower lips making Shara hum with indulgence.

“It’s okay, Rey... Relax, let me do the rest, enjoy this...”

“You already feel... good.”

"Hush now,” Shara goaded her, finger between her lips as she began to buck back and forth.

Immediately Rey felt the sensations brushing against her desire. Shara coaxed her still dripping cunt to begin again, to let loose more wetness as she had done against her thigh and Rey gripped the thin pillow with all her might. She wouldn’t last anywhere near as long as she had done before – Shara knew where to touch her now, where to rub her own beautiful sex against for both of them. The dimensions of a throbbing clitoris were inescapable to Rey, she could feel everything rubbing and rutting up against her. Shara remembered to keep a grip on Rey’s ankle, kissing her foot every so often and down as much of her calf as she could from her position.

The scavenger continued to recoil into the rut Shara developed in no time, really letting her lungs loose and moaning into her shoulder or the pillow. Every time the parched pilot caught just the right spot, they would both cry out for each other, heat rising once more as it had done at the wall. Rey’s fingers fumbled and fawned for her lover’s waistline but could never reach – she retreated, biting her knuckle as the pleasure deepened before her. She’d not experienced ecstasy like this in her lifetime, nothing came close to the sensations Shara Bey, Rebel Heroine, coaxed from her trembling desire, wetness slicking her runway for the pilot to pleasure her further. All of her body, all of her faculties, everything Rey was in a woman she had handed to the crashed A-Wing pilot awaiting repairs and rescue.

It had been such a quick bargain, a gambit played in no time at all and in just as quickly a time, Shara would be gone and Rey would remain (she had to remain on Jakku). But the plucky scavenger was rest assured that she had made the right terms for herself. The more she thought about it, the closer she got.

Shara’s hand had darted for her chest, pulling down her cloth shirt and groping her small but perky bosom. Rey screamed out in pleasure as she felt herself barrelling closer to a repeated orgasm. In response, Shara coaxed her further, impatient and wanting her to come again – Rey half-wondered if she had to ask, but when she looked into her controller’s eyes, Shara silently told her to come when she felt as if she had to. Rey rested back, her head sinking into the small layer of pillow as she gripped its fabric in a strong hand. It was near.

“I’m close...”

“Don’t hold back – come for me.”

“Oh, stars! _Shara_!”

“Come for me, Rey! Come for me! Don’t hold back! _Come_!”

The scavenger saw stars, almost passing out from the force that rifled through her like Zuvio’s Quadjumper. Her body rocked, convulsing toward the stars as she felt a deep and primal wave of the most supreme pleasure coming through. It was to die for, liquid ecstasy coming from her core and out of her folds all over Shara’s as she rode its incredible wave to completion. It was better than any Rey had experienced, sapping what was left of her strength completely and rendering her totally spent on her shambled bedding. Shara unhooked herself from Rey’s desire, slipping back into place next to her. When offering her hand, Rey took all she could get, cuddling up to the older pilot for stability. Soon enough she’d be gone anyway.

Needless to even think about it on Rey’s part. Of course, she would be put to work repairing the A-Wing – first she would need to drag the wreck out of the sand dune to the AT-AT to work in some sense of security – but it was most certainly worth it.

“You come with me back to the New Republic,” Shara suddenly told her, cupping her cheek.

“What?”

“There’s more than enough room in an RZ-2 to fit to pilots.”

“I can’t,” Rey shot down the idea before it could be fully told. She couldn’t leave, and that part was non-negotiable, regardless.

“Oh come on, it has to be better than languishing here,” Shara countered. “There’s more than enough room at my place on Yavin now, I promise. I can set you up, help you out until you get your own ship – repairs get paid in credits in the New Republic, not just food or water like that slave driver pays you...”

“I’m sorry, Shara, really. But I can’t leave Jakku.”

“Why? You’re just... you’re stuck here, Rey.”

“I’m not stuck here,” she almost shouted, her voice slightly rising until Rey had realised how it had come out of her mouth. It was such a long story, and one she never told anyone because no one ever asked. Even still, the truth took its toll on Rey – and it was the truth. “I’m waiting...” She confessed, looking over her sleeping partner and back to the wall she was just pinned against. A plethora of number tallies still littered almost the entire bulkhead and they would continue to do so until the day came when her family returned, that was what she waiting for. Jakku wasn’t her prison, it was her purgatory.

If anything, Rey was its warden. “I’m sorry, Shara... I’ll repair your ship with you so you can escape – but I have to stay...”


End file.
